


Through the Changing Ocean Tides

by satonawall



Category: Glee
Genre: Alternate Universe - Medieval, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-14
Updated: 2015-01-14
Packaged: 2018-03-07 14:40:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 28,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3176307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/satonawall/pseuds/satonawall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Santana is a mercenary who never stops moving. Her life would be so uncomplicated - drink, travel and a new job every once in a while - if she could just stop thinking about the sailor full of stories about the sea that she keeps bumping into.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Through the Changing Ocean Tides

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place in the same universe as [Kind of Heavy](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3176407), which is a Klaine fic which contains very little Brittany and only mentions of Santana.

“You think you’re being so intimidating, don’t you?”

Santana wasn’t quite sure why she’d even bothered to look at the man. He was just like any other, all huffed out that someone didn’t want to drink the beer he’d bought them.

As if Santana would ever even consider tasting beer. If she wanted to drink something that tasted like piss, she’d go for the real deal.

“I don’t think,” the man said.

Santana spoke before he could continue. “Well, that much is obvious.”

“Listen, here,” the man’s friend, even more thick-looking, said. “This gentleman offered you a drink. It’s only polite to say yes.”

“And it’s only polite to take no for an answer,” Santana pointed out, surreptitiously feeling at her pocket. Yes, her knife was there, ready for her use if it came down to that.

There was a flash in the man’s eyes, and Santana would have rolled her eyes if she hadn’t been too busy attacking the man just the tiniest moment before the man attacked her.

The fight, to which the man’s friend quickly joined, was short and not really fair at all.

“Sorry not sorry, boys,” Santana said, pretending to brush a speck of dust off her shoulder. “Remember this the next time when you think about doing something like that to someone. Pleasure to break your arms.”

She stepped over them, still on the floor writhing in pain and not even trying to come up with an insult to launch back at her, and walked out of the pub.

It was a pity, she thought as she stopped a few streets over. She’d really liked the atmosphere there, and their liquor wasn’t half bad either. But she’d learnt the hard way (in a kingdom far, far away from which no one came to tell the tale to her current joints, widespread as they were) that after a confrontation like that, you walked away a legend or came back the following night to be quietly told by the people manning the bar that you were not welcome anymore while the whole pub watched on knowingly. She was the stranger, and those men were regulars that no one wanted to offend.

Well, it wasn’t like she’d be returning to this town that often anyway. Life as a hired mercenary who had issues with commitment was not exactly a picnic, but at least it had the distinct advantage of allowing her as much freedom as she could grab with both of her hands.

The night was still young, though, and she liked to go to meetings with people who wanted to hire her with as little sleep as possible (it put her on edge and had allowed her to dodge many a bullet with people whose company she couldn’t have been able to stand anyway), so she picked a street at random and began walking in hopes of running into someplace she hadn’t banned herself from yet.

The wind brought the smell of rotten fish to her nostrils, and she sighed. She’d grown up firmly inland, and already knew how to read when she learnt that such a thing as the sea even existed. Initially, it had inspired curiosity in her, but her first sea voyage had killed that cat pretty quickly (it turned out she got quite seasick when the mood struck her), and since then she’d mostly been in contact with the sea when her work so required, which meant that as far as she was concerned, ship travel could be made tolerable at best and floating parts of her dead comrades’ bodies were as integral a part of swimming in the sea as the salt water getting into her nose. None of those things were very effective in endearing waters to her.

Then again, though, seamen bars often had the best liquor selection since their regular patrons liked to bring their own, and Santana was always up for alcohols she hadn’t had a taste of yet.

The whole town was a lost cause anyway; considering that her other alternatives would hardly be better than breaking some asshole’s arm at another loser pub, she could as well follow the slim chance of untasted alcohol into the rotten fish smell. At least sailors were usually in good shape and usually offered something vaguely reminiscent of a challenge.

She had to walk all the way to the harbour before she encountered the first place that looked even vaguely promising. It was small and wedged between a tar shop and what looked like a tailor’s shop, but on the upside it was so full that the mixture of sweat and humidity that Santana’s nose was well accustomed to that it masked the smell of rotten fish in the air.

It would do for the night.

After enough poking (she was just moments away from making that literal), the barkeep managed to find something she’d only tasted once, and she withdrew with her drink into the most quiet corner she could find, not really hoping to do an encore of her earlier performance.

She was just intimidating enough to be left mostly alone, and she began sipping from her drink while scanning the crowd.

As the location dictated, the clientele was mostly sailors and other people who did business in the harbour – she could even recognise some fancier coats that had to belong to ship owners or then merchants.

She sighed. Perhaps there had been enough excitement for the night already so that she could be content just drinking herself into oblivion all by her lonesome. The problem with sailors was that most of them were men, and men looking for a woman to keep them company at that. There wasn’t exactly anyone who she wanted to start a conversation with.

A couple of hours and a couple more drinks later, she was well on her way to accomplishing just that. Glancing towards the bar, she wondered if she’d been a good enough customer to warrant enough table service not to let it show that she wasn’t quite steady on her feet. Not that she would be in any danger of falling down, but her way of life tended to make a lot of enemies and she didn’t like to let the sharks smell even the tiniest hint of blood.

Hah. Marine reference. She always got ridiculous like that when she got drunk enough.

“You look like a mermaid I once knew.”

Well, Santana tried to console herself as she looked up to see who’d spoken, at least she wasn’t so drunk she’d say stuff like that.

The source of the voice was a young woman (well, a woman her age, maybe, and it was slightly disconcerting to realise that she used that word only on others) with blonde hair and the most earnest expression Santana had ever seen on any face ever. And she’d seen a lot of faces.

“Do I?” she asked in a little more hostile tone than she’d intended. It wasn’t the blonde’s fault if the liquor made Santana think her dreamier than usual.

Great. Another pun, for while her companion did seem a little ditzy, she was also undeniably gorgeous in a very unfair way considering she was currently wearing overalls with something that looked like fish guts on them. If Santana wasn’t careful, she’d be agreeing with the blonde soon enough and telling her all about her exploits playing with the dolphins in the high seas.

“Yes,” the blonde said very seriously. “She was surrounded by prickly fish as well.”

Santana barked out a laugh before she could help it.

“I don’t know what you’ve had,” she said, “but I want it too.”

The blonde blinked. “I didn’t come here to drink. But if you want to come with me and get some of the stuff I tasted before coming here, I’d be glad to show you. It’s so rare that I meet a mermaid these days.”

Santana quirked her eyebrow. She was pretty sure she knew what the blonde was actually asking.

It was tempting, she had to admit. She hadn’t been planning on getting laid tonight, but then again, plans were made to be broken, and her sex sense told her the woman would be worth breaking them for.

“Sounds great,” she said. “Show me the way.”

“Okay,” the blonde said, offering Santana her hand. “I’m Brittany.”

She took it. “Santana.”

“Nice to meet you, Santana,” Brittany said, using their joint hands to help Santana up from her chair.

She didn’t let go as she led Santana out of the pub (Santana didn’t bother pulling away because Brittany provided very convenient support to prevent it from being seen by anyone that she wasn’t exactly steady on her feet) and actually moved her hand to Santana’s waist once they got to the port itself and began passing docked ships.

“Do you live on a ship?” Santana asked. That would pose a minor problem, of course, since there was no way she was putting on a show for Brittany’s crewmates or even risking the possibility that she might do so accidentally.

“Yes,” Brittany said, “but that’s not where we’re going.”

Santana frowned, just the tiniest bit, but Brittany’s arm was warm around her and the wind from the sea was getting chilly. “Where are we going, then?”

“To the Mermaid Cove.”

That she could work with. Having sex on a beach was generally gross because of the sand (Santana had tried it once and swore to never do it again), but Brittany’s shoulders were covered by a very large and very ugly shawl, and they could probably rest on top of it.

“So, you and mermaids?” she said mostly to say something.

“They’re really pretty and when they sing I can’t walk away.” Brittany’s voice was very earnest, very serious, and Santana was beginning to suspect she hadn’t actually had a little too much of anything.

It hardly mattered, she told herself. Actually, it made it all better, since the sea air was starting to clear her head and while she had nothing against drunken sex, she required both parties to be equally drunk and if Brittany’s Mermaid Cove wasn’t right next to the last ship on the row, Santana probably wouldn’t have qualified by the time they found it.

Even if the mermaid ramblings were not alcohol-induced, Brittany was still gorgeous, and pleasant to be around. Santana had put up with way more for less for one night.

“They also smell better than sailors,” Brittany said. “Sailors only smell a little like the sea and mostly like sweat.”

“Well you got that one correct.” She didn’t usually speak much about herself to the women she met like this, but then again, she wouldn’t be seeing Brittany again; it didn’t matter either way. “I’m a soldier, and the things I could tell you about how they smell.”

“Some dolphins I spoke to found it oddly nice,” Brittany said. “I do like dolphins, but they’re really weird sometimes.”

“Can’t comment on that.” She’d never seen a dolphin, and she was pretty sure Brittany wouldn’t be interested in that time she saw three shark fins in the horizon, probably come to feast on her fallen comrades. It wasn’t exactly a story to get you on the mood for anything. “Never seen any.”

Brittany pulled her closer. “You were an inland mermaid, weren’t you? It must have been really hard, not being close to the water.”

“Well,” Santana said, “my memories of the water are not that nice if I really think about them.”

Again, she was pretty sure Brittany would live happier if she didn’t hear the details.

They reached the end of the docks and Brittany guided her to an alley and then after onto a small path that seemed to lead into the forest.

“Some waters are pretty dead, too.” Brittany pushed a branch out of their way. “But sometimes you find a place with plenty of fish and they’re really pretty and you just never want to leave and swim there with them. What’s your favourite fish?”

Usually, she’d have answered with something about salmon tasting really good, but Brittany’s special brand of oddness was getting into her as well and she couldn’t.

Which, unfortunately, meant that she had to actually think about it.

“I’ve always felt oddly close to sharks,” she said eventually. “Everyone always says they’re these vicious beasts, but a fish’s got to eat, doesn’t it?”

Brittany seemed to think about it. “You’re right,” she said. “The pretty fish that I love eat each other, too, and no one still thinks I’m weird.”

Santana was fairly sure Brittany was sorely mistaken about that last point, but it didn’t seem worth mentioning.

“What’s yours, then?” she asked to get the remark off her tongue. “Favourite fish, I mean.”

Brittany launched into an excited explanation that contained at least seven types of fish Santana vaguely remembered having heard of and probably twice the amount of ones she hadn’t. She did her best to listen to and to understand what Brittany was saying, but she was really glad Brittany didn’t ask her to comment on any of it when she was done.

At least it did have the added benefit that by the time Brittany finished talking, they’d reached the end of the path and were overlooking a cosy-looking cove. Brittany jumped excitedly.

“We’re here,” she said.

Santana looked around. As far as beaches went, it wasn’t half bad; the sand seemed nice and soft, there didn’t seem to be too many rocks or other debris dragged in by the sea, and Santana couldn’t at least see any sea monsters lurking right at the edge of the sea.

“It’s nice,” she offered.

“Yeah, it is.” Brittany let go of her waist and Santana had just the time to squash the little hint of disappointment – what would she even have to be disappointed about? – when Brittany took her hand. “Come and see the water.”

Santana allowed herself to be pulled to the place where the water rose as a wave washed ashore.

“I was here before I came to the pub,” Brittany said. “You said you wanted to try it, too.”

She let go of Santana, but this time it wasn’t quite so fleeting. Then again, Santana thought as Brittany shed herself of her shawl and began to shrug off her overalls, wasn’t this why she’d followed Brittany here in the first place?

Not wanting to make it awkward by being much behind Brittany, she began working on her own buttons as well.

As she shed her shirt, the last garment to go before she was completely nude, she heard a splash. Looking up, its source became obvious: Brittany had walked into the water and was now jumping excitedly up and down.

It seemed like an invitation to follow her, so Santana did. Brittany led her deeper into the water, until their waists disappeared under the surface, and then pointed at somewhere even deeper.

“Do you see that?”

Santana had to really try, but eventually she could make out the red shapes of the plants Brittany was talking about.

“When you dry them a little,” Brittany said, “they make these sounds when you pop them. I used to do that a lot when I was a child.”

“You grew up here?”

She didn’t know why she asked that. She wasn’t exactly known for caring.

“Here,” Brittany said, making a vague gesture towards the sea. “But not there.” Another gesture towards what Santana was almost sure was the direction of the town they’d come from. “I had to grow land legs when we came to a port the first time.”

“So you were a mermaid once, too?”

She meant it as teasing, however gently, but Brittany nodded seriously. “Still am. The legs are just for getting around.”

Santana laughed and raised her feet up in the water because in the moment, it seemed like fun. She wasn’t quick enough to balance herself, though, and her head sank under the surface as well.

When she resurfaced, Brittany was closer, as if she’d been coming to her aid despite the fact that it had to be blatantly obvious Santana was in no danger at all.

“Are you okay?” she asked Santana, reaching out a hand to brush away a wet curl from Santana’s face.

That was altogether too much. Santana had been patient, much more so than usually, but the touch of Brittany’s fingers on her face did her in and she surged forwards, crashed into Brittany and pushed her lips onto Brittany’s.

She must have surprised Brittany, for it took a while for Brittany to return the kiss, but when she did, she did it so enthusiastically, throwing her arms around Santana’s body and pushing her chest against Santana’s in the process, that all doubt vanished from Santana’s mind.

The sea was really warm for a night so late in the year, she remembered thinking at some point, but mostly her thoughts from thereafter were a miscellaneous collection of touches, pleasure and Brittany’s smiles.

It didn’t even get awkward after it was all over.

“I need to get back to the town,” Santana said, sitting up on Brittany’s shawl (she’d been correct; it was excellent for avoiding to get sand on her person). “That looks like the rising sun, and I’ve to meet a man about a mission.”

“That works really well.” Brittany reached upwards just enough to be able to press a kiss against Santana’s shoulder. “My ship’s leaving with the rising sun, too. We could walk there together.”

Santana didn’t usually stick around even for that long, but she told herself she had no idea if the path they’d followed had turns, and if it did, she most certainly wouldn’t know which one to take. It was better to stick close to Brittany until they were somewhere she could easily recognise and navigate from.

That she held hands with Brittany all the way to Brittany’s ship, where she didn’t pull away when Brittany moved in for a (surprisingly sweet, considering the night before) kiss, even as she knew they were closely watched by Brittany’s crewmates, who really would never make it as spies until they learnt some discretion, was neither here nor there. She would never see them again, and the same went for Brittany. It didn’t much matter what conclusions they reached of her.

—-

She accepted the job her morning meeting offered and spent the following three months in company where the only relief to her urges was her own hand and the memories she kept of different times. That wasn’t common, either, because even the thought of anyone of her fellow mercenaries hearing her like that made her blood boil and her heart stop at the same time.

They were not a bad bunch, really, but then again, if there was one thing Santana had to often accept as less than perfect, it was the company of her partners for any given job. This time, she didn’t have to even hit anyone to make them believe she could more than do her part, and if it was only because she’d already worked with Marcus, last name not worth committing to memory, and in that job, she’d had to dislocate a few jaws and then do both their work and hers to perfection, well, the amount of effort Santana had to put into it was exactly the same.

Then again, if she worked with strangers they were usually less likely to think small talk was required or even tolerated.

“So,” Marcus asked one afternoon when he was whittling in front of the tent and Santana had made the mistake of settling down nearby for a quick nap, “how’ve you been since we last met?”

“Fine,” Santana said, turning on her back. “Almost got a knife to my side once, but almost doesn’t count.”

“Sure doesn’t. I almost lost my little toe once, and it’s still there.”

Santana swallowed a comment on what a moving story that surely was, and then, out of politeness and the need to get along with the man for a few more months, asked, “And how about you?”

“Pretty well. Got a job protecting- Can’t remember his name, total prick as they always are, but he took me to Westia so I got to pop by to see my folks. Pretty sweet for a perk, huh?”

“I guess so.”

Luckily, Luke emerged from the tent and started talking about the smell of his socks, and Santana didn’t have to think of a way not to tell Marcus that she had to guess it was so because her family was dead and she had absolutely no idea how sweet it would be to visit them. In her experience, soil was soil everywhere.

After that job, it was onto another. This time she led a group of soldiers and admittedly she enjoyed it a lot when they followed her without problem after she knocked out the largest one of them with a single blow in a completely fair fight. The job was quite short, though, and her superior officer a complete asshole, so she wasn’t too sad to see it go either.

The one after that, that was when it got interesting.

Well, not really the job; it was a shift two-day thing, some surveillance, in and out, and gold as a reward. But after a job well-done, Santana thought she deserved some enjoyment for herself, especially as her next job was promising to be longer and again in the company of men she neither liked nor trusted.

To that end, she hid most of her earnings in her belongings, only taking a few more modest silver coins to indulge at a pub while searching for a companion for the night.

She never got that far.

Santana couldn’t quite say what about the flash of blonde hair disappearing behind a corner caught her attention so; in her experience, there were beautiful blondes but blondness in and of itself was no guarantee of any particular beauty.

She’d been without any company for a long time, though, she rationalised later. Perhaps the hair simply reminded her of the previous time she’d mutually enjoyed someone.

That it turned out to be the same someone was just kind of weird, but nothing Santana couldn’t be fine with.

“Well, hello there,” she said, approaching Brittany when Brittany had stopped walking and seemed to be reading a street sign. “Looking for something?”

Brittany turned around; she’d probably recognised Santana’s voice, since she was already smiling brightly.

Well, at least Santana hadn’t made the mistake of her life by approaching someone who’d felt embarrassed about their tryst afterwards and never wanted to see her again.

Not that Brittany had really struck her as the type to do that, but you never knew.

“Hello,” she said. “I was looking for whales but I think I’d like a mermaid even more.”

With someone else, Santana would have hesitated, but with Brittany, she was quite sure she was more than welcome to take Brittany’s hand, running her thumb across Brittany’s palm.

Brittany’s happy sigh told her she was quite correct in that regard.

“Do you know any beaches here?” she asked with a meaningful tone. “Because if you don’t, I’ve rented myself a room for the night and I’m fairly sure the bed is larger than that shawl you had the last time we met.”

“I had to throw it away,” Brittany said sadly. “At first I liked the sand because it reminded me of you but then it got in my food one time and you didn’t make my teeth sound like that.”

“So I take it you’d like to try the room, then?”

There was a chance she was mistaken, of course, and with Brittany that chance was larger than usual, but Santana was pretty sure Brittany’s happiness at seeing her wasn’t simply due to her probably being happy to see anyone she’d met earlier.

“I like the novelty of a bed that doesn’t move along with the waves,” Brittany said, squeezing Santana’s hand. “Let’s go.”

The inn Santana was staying at was a dump, and the fact that she hadn’t bothered to clean her room before going out that evening didn’t help matters.

“Sorry about the mess,” Santana said, pushing a blood-stained shirt under the bed with her foot while she shook the covers to get rid of the crumbs that had preceded her.

“It’s homely.” Brittany sat at the edge of the bed. “And I can like mess. I usually don’t, but I like this one.”

“Well, that’s great.” Santana folded the pants and vest she’d worn the previous night because of the draught coming from the window and settled them on the floor beside the bed. “I’m really far too happy to see you to actually bother cleaning it up more.”

“I’m happy to see you, too,” Brittany said, reaching for Santana’s hand and pulling her to lie on top of the bed so that Brittany could settle down next to her, her other hand coming up to play with the fabric covering Santana’s shoulder. “You’re my favourite mermaid.”

This time, it was Brittany who kissed her first, but it took Santana no time at all to respond. She’d been prepared.

“We’re leaving early next morning,” Brittany said against Santana’s shoulder once they were done, running her finger against Santana’s back drawing mindless shapes. “I wake up like a crowing cock with the sun, but you seem more like a swan so I’ll probably be gone when you get up.”

“That’s fine,” Santana said, too content to tell Brittany that was how it usually went down with her. “But even if I’m a swan, it doesn’t hurt my beauty to sleep well, so goodnight.”

She turned around, cuddled her face into Brittany’s arm and fell asleep before she could question any of it.

She did indeed wake up with her face smashed against the duvet instead of Brittany and so much later that she couldn’t even feel the warmth of Brittany’s body where it had lain next to her all night.

Instead of Brittany, there was a note, though. Well, not so much a note as a hasty drawing of a swan and what looked a lot like a hen, the swan angling its neck down so that it could kiss the hen.

She threw it away, of course, but when she left for her next job and felt lonely again among her comrades, she thought back to it and smiled.

—-

It was only a few months until she saw Brittany again.

She’d signed up for the job mostly because she hadn’t been to Matria for a while and she really liked the cuisine (plus being part of a guard tended to beat army jobs in that you on the regular got some pretty sweet perks in return for putting up with a fussy noble), and it was kind of a last minute thing, so when she marched to the ship that was taking Lord Whatshisname, she almost fell off the docks when she spotted who was swinging on the side of the ship, probably doing some kind of maintenance.

“Santana!” Brittany shrieked as soon as she turned her head and saw Santana on the docks. She was too far away for conversation, but the excited waving left it blatantly clear she had spotted someone she knew.

“A friend of yours?” Lord Watchyourmouth asked with an arched eyebrow and an unpleasant turn of his mouth.

“We’ve met,” Santana said. “You’ll come to see she doesn’t need much to get excited like that.”

Lord Breakyourfingerssoon looked so distressed at the thought that Santana almost wanted to laugh. “I surely hope I won’t.”

Another member of the guard returned with the Captain, who seemed to be more acceptable to Lord Snobandproud, probably because his clothes were clean and looked like he didn’t do much work in them, and Santana was glad she was no longer expected to partake in conversation.

She did get tasked with the first night shift guarding Lord Howloudcanyousnore’s door, though. Night watches like that were always boring as a rule, and even more so on the first night when no sensible assassin would think they’d gathered enough information to execute the hit to their satisfaction, and while Lord Ineversayhello did strike Santana as the type to get enemies among any and all social classes, the chances that one of the murderous ones was on the ship was quite small.

Then again, that didn’t mean she was going to get cheated out of a paycheque by inattention, and she stood her shift until the very end when another guard came to set her free.

“Enjoy your sleep,” he said, sounding a lot like he might enjoy his too.

It wasn’t Santana’s business, though. If her comrade blundered so badly as to get Lord Punchyouintheface killed, she’d be getting a free trip to Matria and the enormous pleasure of never having to listen to her client again, and when you added immediately going to sleep to that equation and balanced it with sticking around to make sure her ward would be safe on the off-chance that something would happen and she’d get rewarded for making sure it didn’t, the choice was not difficult.

She slipped under the deck and was almost on the door of the cupboard where she and the other guards slept when someone tapped her on the shoulder.

“Hi,” Brittany said. “I didn’t get a chance to say that earlier because the man with the angry mouth was always taking up your time.”

“Hi.” Santana glanced around to make sure no one was witnessing the encounter. “Listen, Brittany-“

“I’ve never sailed the seas like this with a mermaid,” Brittany interrupted her, if you could call it an interruption when Santana was pretty sure her words hadn’t registered with Brittany at all. “Want to go wave at dolphins?”

“That’s what I was going to tell you,” Santana said, stepping closer and pushing her head close to Brittany’s ear. “We can’t- be mermaids here, Brittany. Not with- There’re too many men looking to claim we were sirens, okay?”

She’d have felt really foolish if it wasn’t for how obvious it was that Brittany thought what she said made perfect sense.

“Mermaids doesn’t have to be like that, though,” Brittany pointed out. “Do you know the stars?”

“The southern star exists,” Santana said. “That’s the extent of my knowledge.”

Brittany reached for her hand. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

She said no thank you and went to bed to have the sort of good night’s sleep that started in the middle of the night. Or so Santana fantasised as she followed Brittany back onto the deck, where they mercifully didn’t walk past Lord Hateyoualready’s cabin and the guard there. They did pass one of Brittany’s crewmates, but apparently the crew was well-accustomed enough to Brittany’s antics to not think it weird at all that she was dragging a member of a noble’s guard around the deck in the middle of the night.

“Get on your back,” Brittany told her once they were in… whatever the part on the front was called that was higher than the middle.

Santana frowned, seconds away from arguing, but Brittany followed her own advice, and her hand was still linked with Santana’s, so it came off quite naturally to follow her example. Once she did so, she understood perfectly why Brittany had wanted her to do that.

She’d never been much of a stargazer, but they were quite beautiful when you looked at them like that.

Brittany shifted closer to her so that their sides were touching.

“That’s the southern star,” she said, pointing at one of them. Santana couldn’t even say which one.

“Nice.”

“You still don’t know which one it is.”

“No, I don’t.”

Lowering her own pointing hand, Brittany grasped Santana’s left hand and pointed up, moving even closer so that their vantage points would be as similar as possible.

“There,” she said. “It’s to the right of the mess of triangles and above those ones that look like a pair of fish. The sort of lonely one, like it’s keeping its distance from all the other stars.”

If it wasn’t Brittany, Santana would have been pretty sure they were talking about something other than stars entirely, but it was, which meant that Brittany was talking about stars. Any other meanings Santana could discard at will.

“Yeah,” she said. “I see it now.”

“You see the triangles, too?”

“Yeah.”

“They’re called the Directions,” Brittany said. “It’s a little weird because they can’t actually give you any, except maybe for how to get lost.”

Santana couldn’t help laughing. Unfortunately, it was the sort of relaxing laugh that allowed her to for a moment forget that she could be sleeping instead of being where she was with Brittany, and she settled more comfortably on the planks.

“And what are those fish called?”

She’d probably have to check later from an actual star map if anything Brittany had told her was actually true to anyone else, but by the time they got back under the deck and Santana slipped into her tiny, tiny bed (she’d had a glimpse of Lord Iwillalwaysleepalone’s bed, and anyone who thought that the world was in any way fair was all too welcome to check it out for themselves), she felt like she wouldn’t even mind if they weren’t.

She got a disapproving look from Lord Sleptthewholenight in the morning for yawning into her hand, but she was too busy glaring at him (he’d do well to remember that most of her missed sleep was due to his precious security concerns) to feel self-conscious or in any way bad about the previous night.

It didn’t end there.

She might have been wrong, but it felt like every time she ran into Brittany, save for those when both of them were definitely working with absolutely no chance of getting away from it for any time at all, Brittany always had something new and exciting she wanted to show her. They spent another midnight hour looking at the plants that grew in the water, Brittany telling Santana everything she knew about their use, even if they didn’t actually have one, and a lazy afternoon looking up at the sails and going over everything you had to do to keep them in good condition and how you could use them. Just to name a few. After the first night, neither of them brought up the possibility of doing something more physical than holding hands, and even then, Brittany seemed to instinctually realise that it was something they could only do when they were alone.

Her fellow guards might have noticed, or then they didn’t; Santana didn’t bother making friends with them, and she never slacked on her duty in favour of going with Brittany, much as that was tempting sometimes, so they couldn’t even bring it up under the pretext of her not doing her job. Truth be told, Santana didn’t much care, which was perhaps new for her, but then again, she had no intentions of ever working with them again, and their work with Lord Mustbepampered wouldn’t last for long.

“Have you been on this ship for long?” she asked Brittany one evening when Brittany was talking to her about the islands they were passing.

“Five years,” Brittany said. “I think they took me in only because my dad asked, but they didn’t ask me to leave when he and mum went into the sea to rule the corals so I guess we’re family now.”

Santana was pretty sure she knew what had actually happened to Brittany’s parents, but she didn’t really want to bring it up. Parents and families was not a topic she ever really wanted to discuss.

“I guess you proved them wrong, too,” she said, turning her head to be able to look at the island with the palm trees a little longer. “I mean, I don’t know much about sailing but you seem pretty capable to me.”

She wouldn’t have thought so, from her first encounter with Brittany, but it was true. Santana was good at watching for things like that, and while the captain never complimented Brittany, never complimented anyone in fact, Santana could gather that Brittany regularly got some of the more difficult tasks, if sailors’ complaints about their assigned tasks were anything to go by, and that when her crewmates needed help, it was Brittany that they called for.

She was happy for Brittany, she guessed. She looked like someone who’d want to have a family around.

“I am,” Brittany said. “I’m very good. I was even once offered a place in another crew, and they were leaving for Sandon. It’s a very difficult route. Have you ever been there?”

Not for a long while. And she wouldn’t go back, not even to see if the wooden carvings marking her family’s graves had lasted the way the carpenter had promised they would.

“No,” she lied. “How was it?”

“I don’t know.” Brittany leaned against the rail. “I didn’t go. You don’t just switch families because some other family compliments you and wants you to do something for them.”

“I guess.”

She braced herself for the question that never came. Instead, Brittany just smiled at her, pointed at one of the other islands and started telling Santana about one time when they’d had to stop there and she’d drunk the juice of a fruit that had fallen down from a tree to almost knock one of her crewmates unconscious.

The winds were favourable – or so Brittany said, and Santana had no reason to distrust her – and soon enough, they reached the Matrian port they had been trying for. Santana was quite sure Lord Ineverhavetowait wouldn’t be too happy about it, but before meeting the others on deck, she searched out Brittany.

“Will the ship stay here for a while?”

“A few days, more if the captain can’t fill the hold that quickly.” Brittany ran her fingers along the ropes she was holding. “You want to splash like mermaids again, don’t you?”

Santana thought back to that night in the cove. Yeah, splash was one way to describe it.

“Would you be opposed?” she asked, just the tiniest bit of defensiveness creeping into her tone.

“No, not at all.” Brittany put her hand on Santana’s arm, just for a second, but it was definitely there. “Come find me here when you’re ready.”

“I will.”

Taking Lord Myfatherwillhearaboutthis to his equally noble but significantly less annoying hosts didn’t take very long, and while the nobility was always far more eager to spend money on their lavish lifestyle than on the pay of those who made that lifestyle possible, it wasn’t even completely dark when Santana walked away with her earnings in her pocket.

She was quite used to uncomfortable living, so even the humblest inn was to her like a palace, and she already knew Brittany wouldn’t mind the lack of grandeur. Besides, she highly doubted Brittany could even be impressed by things that money could buy. Accordingly, she sought out the closest place she could find whose owner didn’t look like a total creep and whose walls looked like they might hold at least a minimal amount of noise.

Brittany was examining ropes when Santana came back, sitting well-placed to see the docks (Santana had to wonder if that was intentional) and waving at Santana already from far away.

“Will you wait for a few moments?” she asked as Santana approached the ship. “This is the last one, and then I can go.”

Standing by and watching as Brittany worked felt quite awkward considering that, while Santana had not bothered to spend any time with any of the crew except for Brittany, they probably did know her face after many days at sea on the same ship. Squaring her shoulders and assuming her most hostile face, Santana wondered what they were thinking of her and Brittany. Brittany told her they were like family, but then again the thing about families was that you loved them even through all their crap, so Santana couldn’t rule out any possibilities.

She shook her head, angry at herself. She wasn’t supposed to care about what would happen when she and Brittany parted ways, which was bound to happen soon enough.

But, she tried to reason, it wasn’t really the same thing to just overall care about someone and to simply not want them to be hurt. It wasn’t like she was pining about where Brittany would go and who she’d sleep with once Santana was gone; she was simply worried that Brittany’s crewmates would turn violent and Brittany couldn’t fight them off. She was a lone wolf, not a bloodthirsty one who wanted her past mates devoured by their pack.

So it was completely reasonable to flash a hint of the blade of her sword and glare at any and all sailors that passed and even so much as glanced at them.

“I’m ready!” Brittany jumped up and threw the last rope onto the pile with others. “Do you know where we’re going?”

“Oh, I think we all know where you’re going,” a passing sailor said with the most exaggerated wink Santana had ever witnessed. “Just go already, your love’s been pretty patient already.”

Santana glared, but Brittany didn’t seem to think his intent malicious.

“I don’t think they know which place you picked,” she said, taking Santana’s hand and leading her off the ship. “He’s just saying that because they all think we’re going to have sex.”

“Well,” Santana looked around to make sure no one was close enough to hear her words, “they’re not wrong, are they?”

“No,” Brittany said, squeezing her hand. “but they think it’s sex like the sex they are going to have tonight when it’s so much better, so they’re still wrong and I win.”

Santana got the distinct impression she didn’t quite understand what Brittany actually meant, but that was neither here nor there. It couldn’t really be anything important, she told herself and squeezed Brittany’s hand in return.

The inn wasn’t far away, but as they approached, Santana couldn’t help but see it with foreign eyes that picked up on details she didn’t give a damn about herself: the inelegant workmanship, the sign whose text was practically faded out, the shutters that were open to reveal the windows had no glass.

“We can go somewhere else,” she said, feeling obliged to. “I know it’s not-“

“You live there now,” Brittany said. “It’s fine. I like that it doesn’t smell like sailor sweat.”

Santana ducked her head to hide her smile.

“And besides,” Brittany went on, “I took you to a beach the first time. Sand is really icky when your skin is wet and hot.”

They said good evening to the innkeeper on their way up to Santana’s room, and Santana was pretty sure that, given her regular clientele, she assumed Brittany to be a prostitute (or then that Santana herself was one, given that her sword was hidden again and Brittany’s clothes did give off a certain sailor feel) but at least she was tactful enough not to say anything about it.

She’d spent a week wanting with her eyes what her body couldn’t have, so it was hardly a surprise that she only barely managed to close the door after them before she had Brittany under her on the bed (the whole thing was only helped by Brittany going so eagerly, pulling Santana down with her as she fell onto the bed).

“Will you do that thing you did the last time?” Brittany asked, blinking slowly and smiling like she had no idea what that expression did to Santana. “I’ve been dreaming about it since then, and it’s been a long time.”

It hadn’t been that long a time, not really, but it as well could have been. She’d missed this, Santana thought, looking down at Brittany and smiling back. Pushing her fingers into Brittany’s hair to cradle her head, Santana leaned down to brush a kiss against her jaw.

“Gladly.”

Later (Santana didn’t measure sex with a clock but it had to be a lot of time in clocktime as well), Brittany wanted to learn how to reciprocate it, and while Santana had to admit she was much too spent for the night, they did make plans for the following.

Some more time after that, Santana would blame her tiredness for letting Brittany curl up around her and fall asleep on Santana’s bed, but that didn’t quite explain how her arms wound up around Brittany right before she drifted off as well.

They woke up tangled together, a feeling quite foreign to Santana despite all her experience in other regards. It was good, though; Brittany’s feet had warmed up hers, and Santana had never known a more pleasant way to get sleep off her eyes than having Brittany kiss it away.

Afterwards, Brittany wanted to go get something to eat, and they searched the town until they found delicious Matrian bread and a hot drink to wash it down with. It was absolutely the first time Santana had ever shared a meal, even breakfast, with one of her lovers, but she couldn’t even bring herself to mind. They were both hungry, she told herself. What could have been more natural?

—-

“We’re leaving tomorrow,” Brittany said the following night, drawing nonsensical figures against Santana’s stomach. “The captain told us today.”

Santana had figured as much. It was a busy trading time; she’d assumed the captain would have no trouble getting new cargo.

“So this is our last night together.”

Brittany nodded.

Santana ran her finger down Brittany’s side. “So we’ll just have to make it count.”

“But I lost count already.” The movement of Brittany’s hand on her bare skin felt more purposeful, now. “Maybe we could lose it some more, though.”

Santana laughed. “What an excellent idea.”

—-

She saw Brittany off to her ship and didn’t even break anyone’s arm for looking at them, but she did draw the line at standing on the docks and waving goodbye to the ship as it sailed away.

Standing on the busy merchant street and watching it go without waving or telling Brittany what she was going to do was a different thing, right?

That night, she went back to her usual between-jobs routine; Matria was well-known for the cuisine, and the port was no exception.

It just so happened that the best cheap establishments selling food also happened to sell copious amounts of alcohol. How very convenient for her.

She was finishing her second plate and third glass and eyeing the (rather creepily, were she more superstitious Santana would fear vampires and pass) pale redhead by the window when someone sat down on the other side of her table.

“That’s taken,” she said reflexively before she caught a glimpse of the intruder of her peace. “But I’m not,” she added with a smile once she did.

Looking at the stranger head on, Santana had the chance to verify that she was, indeed, absolutely gorgeous, even in the modest dress that gave off a feeling of being in town for business (which was a good sign for the future, in her experience), but also wearing a Tyrian promise band on her left wrist (which definitely was not).

“Well I am,” the woman said (just made it official, then). “That is not the sort of proposition I had in mind when I sat down.”

Santana arched her eyebrow. “I’m listening.”

“My name is Mercedes Jones,” the woman reached out her hand and Santana shook it politely. “I assume I am talking to a Santana Lopez?”

“I prefer ‘the’, if you wouldn’t mind.” She didn’t feel like toying with the mysterious Ms Jones, though, so she added, “But yes, I am her.”

“I might have a job for you.”

“Might? Are you not certain if the job will exist or do you expect me to provide you proof of my skills before you decide if you want to hire me for it?”

Ms Jones pursed her lips. “Not certain if you wish to take it, actually.”

Santana tilted her head and reassessed Ms Jones. If she truly was here in business, there was no telling what kind of job she would offer Santana. There were some pretty wild ones out there. She should know.

“I do always enjoy a challenge,” she said.

“Well to be completely frank with you, I am not offering you one.”

“You’re being very cryptic for someone who’s soliciting a hired hand at a port foreign to both of us.” Santana took a sip of her drink. “I won’t deny I find it intriguing, but I’d recommend you show the mouse before the cat gets tired.”

Ms Jones’s right hand reached out to fiddle with the promise band. “I require an escort on my way home,” she said. “My business here is finished and I’m urgently required there, but there is no one else I’ve been able to find to make the journey with, and it runs through dangerous forests.”

Santana tapped her finger against the table. “The job you propose is easy enough for someone of my skills,” she said, “and your personality does not seem nearly as ghastly as those of the people who usually request such services, which between you and me is the most common reason hired hands turn down offers like these. What’s the factor you’re not telling me about that makes you so uncertain of your ability to hire me?”

Ms Jones squared her shoulders and looked Santana straight in the eye. “I asked around about your usual rates. I can offer you a quarter of that.”

Santana sat back on her chair, contemplating the situation and the woman in front of her. She didn’t need to ask why Ms Jones had come to her, of all people. Mercenaries were common as fish in the water, but it was without a doubt overwhelmingly a man’s profession, and an unscrupulous man’s profession at that. Ms Jones was a very comely woman, and if it just so happened that she was transporting a little more than a few garments and a tiny bit of tea to take to her family as a souvenir, Santana couldn’t name many men in her profession that she could with good conscience recommend Ms Jones trust her life to. With high probability, the person supposed to protect her would turn out to be the greatest danger to avoid.

Then again, Tyria was a wasteland as far as her kind were concerned; all that republicanism and taking care of the poor and the sick bred very little nobles with deep pockets who were the bread and butter of her profession. If her journey there gained her a quarter of her usual, she’d have to assume her journey away wouldn’t fare even that well.

“A quarter of my usual rate,” she said, “and you will either pay for my journey away from Tyria or else find me a job that does the same.”

“Of course,” Ms Jones said. “I cannot guarantee that that will happen swiftly, though. I will naturally lodge you for free for the time you’ll have to wait.”

That wasn’t actually the drawback Ms Jones presented it as. Santana liked travelling, and she’d never been to Tyria and probably wouldn’t repeat the experience ever again; better make the first and only time count. Ms Jones didn’t need to know that, of course, not that it changed anything.

Santana smiled at her, and it was only a little reminiscent of her favourite fish. “That goes without saying.”

It was subtle, but Santana had trained herself to notice these things, and Ms Jones definitely relaxed.

“I wish to leave as quickly as possible,” she said. “Preferably tomorrow morning. Would you like to come with me to discuss details or-“ she glanced back at the pale redhead; it seemed Santana was not the only one with a keen eye for human behaviour, “do you have other business for tonight?”

She hadn’t washed properly since the ship had landed in Matria. It was a safe bet that there was a spot along her thigh that still tasted like Brittany, not to mention that she probably reeked of some kind of combination of the sailor sweat smell Brittany always spoke about and the stench of soldiers being crammed together in small quarters.

“Nothing that cannot wait until ours is concluded,” she said, downed her glass and stood up. “Shall we?”

—-

Ms Jones – “Oh, please, call me Mercedes, we Tyrians get embarrassed by such formalities – had little luggage, and Santana had always made sure she could carry everything she owned, so their combined belongings were not too much for two horses, which was very good since Mercedes’s associates, whoever they were, apparently trusted her well enough to loan her two fit and well-fed horses for the journey.

“You must be something special,” Santana said, making friends with the one assigned to her. “I’ve never known a Matrian merchant give so much credit to someone who cannot pay her escort the regular wages.”

“I’ve friends in high places,” Mercedes said. “And by high places I mean the woman who takes care of their horses when they visit Tyria. She was very kind to vouch for my honesty.”

Santana shrugged her shoulders. She still got the distinct impression that that wasn’t the whole story, but it was probably not very relevant for the job; she would already be on her guard against attackers whether Mercedes had any secret value she hadn’t shared with Santana or not, and at least she had the reassurance of knowing Mercedes to be careful. She hadn’t babbled to Santana, so she probably hadn’t babbled to anyone else either.

The journey wasn’t long, just a few weeks, but Mercedes had been right; it was not the safest in the world. The Matrian leg was fine enough, following the coast for a few days’ journey before turning inland along a relatively well-kept road, but the road ended at a town near the Westian border and after that a ten days’ ride in the wilderness (Santana always assumed everyone used the word as an euphemism for the Westian authorities’ reputation) was required before crossing over to Tyria and travelling for perhaps a day before reaching the capital where Mercedes was headed.

Their travels went fine, though. Santana didn’t know what Mercedes was transporting in her packages, but on the outside it didn’t look like much, which was all she cared about. Coupled with Mercedes’s dresses (from what Mercedes said Santana gathered she always dressed more modestly for travelling, exactly for safety reasons), they gave a thoroughly innocent and monetarily worthless feel. Probably the most suspicious thing about them was Santana herself, quite unable (and unwilling; it was always better to discourage any attackers from trying anything than fight them when they did) to hide her true colours, her sword being blatantly visible and her mannerisms giving her away to anyone who was looking.

(“Don’t you ever get scared of tripping on that thing?” Mercedes asked her as Santana got down from her horse, having to work around the sword so that it wouldn’t poke the poor creature.

“Practice,” Santana said. “It is a man’s man’s world among my kind, you have to learn pretty quickly to look like you can do anything if you want to survive. Including being more graceful than a royal princess while doing things the others fall down on their nose attempting.”

“Sounds annoying.”

“Just tell me about it.”)

Something happened, though, something that was quite fortunate on that regard but still left Santana surprised.

She became friends with Mercedes.

She never did, not with anyone. She had useful acquaintances all around the world, not friends. And she most certainly did not make friends with her customers, because that way lay all sorts of stupidity.

But Mercedes was not like her other customers. She was genuinely kind but didn’t take any of Santana’s shit, funny but not in a sarcastic way, and Santana didn’t even notice it happening until she was leaning on Mercedes’s shoulder, doubled over from laughter at something Mercedes had just said.

It was just fine, she reasoned. Friendship was quite possibly the only explanation why someone like her would be travelling with someone like Mercedes, aside from either of them trying to hide something. It was great for discouraging suspicions and consequently also attempted attacks on them.

Even she didn’t believe that had any bearing on her behaviour, but it did hold true anyway.

“What’s it like usually?” Mercedes asked one night when they were getting ready to curl up in blankets in the forest, their horses grazing nearby. “Your work?”

Santana had to think about it a little.

“Solitary,” she finally said.

“I thought mercenaries usually worked in groups?”

“I don’t mean that. It’s-“ A lot of it was just her, not her kind in general, but then again Santana was rather sure Mercedes’s interest was in Santana, not some curiosity about mercenaries as a group. “Depending on the job, I don’t trust the people I work with, I don’t trust my employers, I don’t trust the people I’m around because often enough I’m supposed to either intimidate them or fool them, I don’t trust anyone. Some form groups, yeah, exactly because they need someone they can count on, but I’ve seen enough of those eat themselves from the inside out until the most ruthless member is left standing that I can’t really trust the idea of them either.”

Mercedes swallowed a little wine and offered it to Santana. “Sounds lonely.”

“I’m still alive.”

Mercedes seemed to notice how uncomfortable she was with the topic, so she mercifully stopped asking questions.

Through the power of friendship or not, they made it to the Tyrian capital without getting into more serious trouble than a glaring match with a Westian soldier who seemed quite unable to comprehend that two ladies like them (Santana knew all too well what that meant) would be passing by the town he was guarding without any interest in entertaining soldiers, let alone that his words were not a compliment of any kind. Santana pursed her lips, let her breathing come out really slowly and spent the next hour fantasising of kicking the soldier to the curb, but she didn’t stop to make her fantasies reality.

They reached Ljubum (Santana sneered a little at the name; it seemed too slippery to her ears to be a respectable capital) midday, and now it was Mercedes’s turn to instruct Santana as they navigated the streets towards the stables.

Mercedes’s horse guarantee, a cheerful woman called Tina, greeted Mercedes with an incredibly warm hug and offered her hand to Santana with an equally warm smile that only seemed to get wider when Mercedes launched into the explanation of how she’d come to hire Santana.

“That was quite generous of you,” Tina said, keeping up the conversation as she started to work on the horses. “I haven’t heard of too many mercenaries who’d do the same thing.”

“We are quite the gentlemanly bunch, that’s true.”

Her tone was snarky, but when Tina glanced back at her, Santana was smiling, too.

“I know I promised you lodgings,” Mercedes said once they left the stables, “but would you mind accompanying me someplace first? I’d really rather not carry these things around more than I need to, they’re quite heavy.”

Santana shrugged and took one parcel to ease Mercedes’s burden.

She’d expected Mercedes to take them to a shopkeeper, or then a somewhat-richer-than average connoisseur of something Matrian that Mercedes had promised to provide.

Instead, Mercedes marched right up to the Stadtholder’s residence and the House of Parliament, and the weirdest thing was, no one tried to stop her or even ask who was trailing after her.

Santana’s brow furrowed. She had quite underestimated her new friend.

She’d never actually seen a picture of the current Stadtholder of Tyria, but she’d heard whispers and stories, and the man who walked up to them in the front hall quite fit the description.

Santana carefully didn’t show her surprise when Mercedes called him by his first name. She knew Tyrians were not a very formal society, far from it, but there was still something weird about witnessing it up close. Not to mention that no society was so informal that anyone could just walk up to the House of Parliament and be personally met by the current ruler.

“No trouble on the journey?” ‘Burt’ (it would take a while to get used to that, even if Santana wouldn’t share her discomfort with anyone) asked Mercedes.

“None,” Mercedes said, “thanks mostly to this lovely lady here. Burt, this is Santana Lopez. Santana, Burt Hummel.”

Burt took in her looks, eyes lingering on the sword and (Santana filed that knowledge away) on the slight bulge around Santana’s ankle that gave away the presence of a smaller knife to someone who was looking carefully enough.

“I can’t thank you enough, then, Santana,” he said, offering his hand, which Santana took and shook.

“My pleasure.”

Usually when she said that, she thought of the money she gained from a job, but this time she was glad to realise she was just thinking of Mercedes’s safe return.

“I just came by to drop these to you,” Mercedes said, offering Burt the majority of her luggage. “We’ve had a tiring couple of weeks, and I rather think it’s time for some rest.”

Burt nodded. “Of course. Once you’re rested, I’d like to see you again to discuss something,” Santana got the distinct idea they both knew what ‘something’ was but didn’t wish for her to know, “so if you’d come and find me, say, tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow suits me fine,” Mercedes said, and they wished Burt goodbye and left the building.

“So,” Santana said once they were outside on a busy street making their way towards Mercedes’s lodgings, “what kind of a person doesn’t have enough gold for a mercenary but personally knows the ruler of a country?”

“Me,” Mercedes answered. “And a lot of the people you see around yourself. He was the town’s best wagon maker before he was elected to his current office, a lot of people here know him.”

“Maybe,” Santana said. “But I bet he doesn’t want to have urgent rendez-vous with most of the people here. I didn’t know you were someone of such importance.”

Mercedes stopped and turned to look at her. “Does that change anything? Because I was not lying about my means, but I can-“

“Relax,” Santana said. “I’m not feeling cheated out of money, and besides I feel like I should give you a discount anyway for not being nearly as annoying as everyone else whose life I’ve ever guarded. I am just very innocently curious.”

Mercedes’s shoulders dropped and she seemed to let out a breath she’d been holding. “I’m one of his advisors,” she said as they resumed walking. “I go on diplomatic missions and follow him when he goes to negotiate alliances and the like.”

Santana let out a low whistle. “You’d be a great actress,” she said. “I never thought I was escorting anyone of more importance than a merchant’s trusted apprentice transporting something valuable.”

Mercedes laughed. “If you got that far, I’m not as good an actress as I fancied myself. I thought those parcels would look exactly like supplementary clothes or something of the kind. I didn’t mean for anyone, even you, to pick up on the fact that they held any value whatsoever.”

“Well, to be fair to you,” Santana said, “most others probably didn’t. But I saw you wear the same two dresses for two weeks, carefully hiding the stains. And as far as I know, you don’t have another pair of shoes. One does start to wonder what the rest of the parcels contain if they’re never used. Besides, you didn’t tell me why you need to come back so urgently. I figured it was the stuff that was coming with you or a family emergency, and you’d have mentioned a family emergency, if not right off the bat in an attempt to sway me with sentimentality, then at least later while we rode for hours and had plenty of time to talk.”

She killed her curiosity about why Mercedes had really needed to come and what she was really transporting. She was quite new to the idea of trusting someone, but she was rather certain that that information was not threatening her life even if she never found out.

Mercedes lived in a room on top of a small bakery. She offered Santana her bed, but Santana had had ample opportunity to observe that of the two of them, she was far more adept at falling asleep without proper bedding and declined (not that it usually would have had much effect on her but, well, friends), opting for the rather plush sofa Mercedes had. Just laying down on it was enough to convince her that she couldn’t get any better sleep on the bed.

Santana had expected to be bored out of her mind during the time Mercedes would need to arrange for her departure, but she was surprised to find out she didn’t. Mercedes was quite busy with work herself (without knowing any specifics, Santana could clearly see why she’d needed to come as quickly as possible), but she still found time to spend with Santana, and besides she introduced Santana to some of her friends who were all too willing to help her fill the rest of her schedule. She spent quite some time at the stables talking with Tina and surreptitiously observing how Tina took care of the horses (you never knew when information like that came in handy). The evening of their arrival saw a young man of their age bursting into Mercedes’s room quite unannounced, and it was good that Mercedes was there to tell Santana to put her sword away and the man, introduced as Kurt, to not freak out about her having pulled it out in the first place. It turned out Kurt was Mercedes’s friend, a tailor and, as it happened, son of Burt the Stadtholder. Once they got over the whole wariness about the sword and unannounced arrivals, Santana found Kurt to be pleasant company, the perfect sparring partner in wars that were fought only with words (they were secretly one of her favourite kind, but she didn’t often get to indulge in them during her jobs; at least, not with a worthy opponent). There were others, too, since it was not surprising that an advisor to the ruler would have cultivated a large circle of acquaintances and friends, but while Santana could without problems spend time with them, she quite gravitated towards Tina, Kurt and obviously Mercedes herself.

For that matter, she was quite pleasantly surprised to realise that they enjoyed her company, too. She’d always known she knew how to be pleasant when she wanted to, usually when she wanted something from someone else, but she didn’t even have to try with them. She was simply herself, and that seemed fine enough to all of them, even after a few weeks. She’d forgotten what that was like.

“You know,” she said to Mercedes one night when they were sharing a pie from the downstairs bakery, “if I didn’t know what Tyria’s like for people like me, I’d accuse you of intentionally procrastinating on getting me out of here.”

“What makes you think I’m not doing it right now?” Mercedes asked, licking cherry off her finger. “Don’t insult me by telling me you’re incredibly eager to come back here for visits after you leave.”

Santana made a point to be quiet. Mercedes wasn’t wrong.

“Just-“ Mercedes looked down at the ground. “Don’t be a stranger. We’re going to miss you.”

She’d had a glass of liquor earlier, which was the excuse Santana was going to give anyone who questioned her about saying what she said next.

“I’m going to miss you, too.” She couldn’t let the words hang there by themselves, though, adding, “Who knows? Maybe you’ll need an escort again. I know someone if that happens. I hear she even does discounts to people who don’t drive her up the wall.”

“Maybe,” Mercedes said, sounding a lot like not sounding sad was a conscious decision. “Maybe.”

A few more weeks passed, and Santana began feeling at home on Mercedes’s sofa. She told herself there should be a ‘too’ there somewhere, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to add it there.

“You call _this_ bad?” she said one night, raising the bottle meaningfully at Kurt who was lounging on the floor by her (Mercedes’s) sofa. “You should have tasted this one drink I had in… Gosh, I don’t even remember where, but compared to it, this,” another shake of the bottle, “this is nectar from the gods.”

“It is rather unfortunate that we cannot all have your great life experiences,” Kurt said, somehow managing not to look completely ridiculous raising an eyebrow while lying on the floor, “but you cannot deny that you’re eyeing the bottle Mercedes brought from Matria. We can all see you. It’s not subtle.”

“How do you know I’m not just pondering what I’ll be drinking once this one’s finished? Your glass was so full you only need to take one more before that’s the harsh reality we’ll have to deal with.”

“Empty or not,” Mercedes said, “you’re not getting anything from my collection. It’s all far too good for someone so far gone as you two right now.”

“I don’t remember you looking all too composed just moments ago when you were giggling over the faintest implication that Kurt might have a thing for that mushy guy with the weird nose.”

“Chandler doesn’t have a weird nose!”

“And yet you immediately realised which of your numerous admirers I was referring to.”

“Yes, because we talked about him just moments ago!”

“I don’t know why you’re so up in arms about it,” Mercedes said. “It’s not like you actually care for the guy, you’re just a little flattered by his blatant affections.”

Kurt huffed. In his current state, it was rather amusing. “How do you-“

“How do I know that? Need I remind you how swift you were in showing your feelings to Finn? To _Sam_? And you knew there was but a slim chance there, but you did it anyway. Chandler’s actually completely enamoured with you. If the feeling were mutual, we’d be planning your nuptials already.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Santana said before Kurt could huff out any retorts that would make her forget about his. “Hummel had a thing for Sam? _Your_ Sam?”

Mercedes’s hand found the promise band on instinct, and she ran her thumb over it. “My Sam,” she said, looking off into the corner with a small, private smile. “Although to be fair, this was before the two of us even properly knew each other. He had recently moved here, and Kurt thought-“

“Stop right there, or I’ll give her the intricate details your childhood infatuation with me,” Kurt said, and Mercedes stopped with a look that told Santana both of the stories would be ones she’d absolutely need to hear.

Well, she’d have plenty of time to prod them out of Kurt and Mercedes when she got them away from each other. Aside from things pertaining to her job, Mercedes was on the gossipy side, and if she wouldn’t budge, Santana could always tell Kurt that she had and wait for him to want revenge.

“And do you have stories about anyone special that you’d like to share, Santana?” Mercedes asked just as the silence was about to become awkward.

“Oh, you know me,” Santana said, throwing one of her legs over another and smiling her shark smile. “Always moving, someone in every town but we cannot remember each other’s names anymore if we ever learnt them.”

“Sounds lonely,” Kurt commented before taking sip of his drink, looking like the perfect caricature of aloof sophistication with his red cheeks and ruffled hair.

“Lonelier than you and your hand waiting for the perfect white knight who’s taking an awful lot of time to find you?” Santana asked with more venom than she’d intended.

“Probably yes,” Kurt shot back. “If your bitter tone is anything to go by, of the two of us I’m far happier with my choices.”

Santana was halfway on her route to pinning Kurt against the floor by his throat before she even realised what she was doing. She let herself fall to the floor, rubbing at her temples.

“If you want it to continue to work out, never do it twice with the same person,” she said, mostly to herself. “Once is a good night of shared pleasure, the second time is when you start doubting your whole life.”

Kurt sat up, shuffled a little closer and awkwardly patted her shoulder.

“It wouldn’t work out anyway,” Santana said, still to herself. “I mean, she’s… It just wouldn’t. It’s fine for the occasional dip on the unusual side, but she’s a sailor, and I’m me, even if either one of us wanted it to happen, it just couldn’t.”

She was afraid either Kurt or Mercedes would say something, try to convince her about how wrong she was, but it seemed she’d been selling them short for neither said a word for a long time.

“Screw quality,” Mercedes said eventually, standing up. “I’m corking that older bottle from Matria, I feel like we all need a little more.”

The rest of the night was a little fuzzy in Santana’s mind – she had a vague memory of trying to teach Kurt and Mercedes how to fight off a bandit attacking in the woods, but that was it – but she woke up cuddling an empty bottle so that probably was indicative of something.

—-

Being without responsibilities and duties, she could sleep however long she liked. Or she could have, had Mercedes not shaken her awake at a time that didn’t seem to be too long after the sun came up.

“Burt would like to meet with you,” she said.

Santana groaned and forced herself to get up. There wasn’t much she could do to change her appearance, but at least she could eat a little bit of garlic to hide the drink in her breath and to not put on the shirt she’d worn the previous night and which was now beautifully adorned with a stain from someone (she wasn’t ready to admit it was herself, but it well could have) having spilt liquor on it.

As she walked towards the House of Parliament, she wondered if word had somehow got back to Burt Hummel that his son was indulging in excessive drinking in the company of many women, but it seemed quite unlikely to her. First off, she was rather sure Burt was not the kind of man to look down on such pursuits as long as they were simply occasional fun, and anyway Kurt’s leanings towards men, exclusively, were rather well known, and Santana hadn’t been shy of her own equally exclusive leanings either, and when it came to Mercedes, she was very happily and faithfully promised to another. If Burt was suspecting that his son was going down a path of salacious vices, Mercedes and Santana were hardly the company you’d expect him to practice them in.

However, it was the only reason she could come up with during her walk, but at least the mental exercise brightened her somewhat so that she did not look like she’d risen from the grave as she greeted Burt in his study.

“I see you, too, had fun the previous night,” Burt said as she sat down.

“You should see the others,” Santana answered without humour.

“I have. Mercedes is great at hiding it and Kurt’s going to spend the day thanking his lucky stars his job doesn’t oblige him to leave his room today.”

“Is that why you asked me here today? To express your concern over my corrupting your nearest and dearest?”

“No.” Burt rested his elbows on his desk. “Quite the contrary. I wish to offer you a job commanding one of the army regiments to Tampea.”

Santana raised her eyebrow. “Just _to_ Tampea? Not to do anything there?”

“Just to take them there,” Burt said. “Their actual lieutenant is going to meet them there, he’s been away visiting a relative. I can assure you it is simply a matter of leading them there and perhaps counting their numbers one or two times along the way. Like guiding a row of ducks.”

Santana nodded. It was probably the only way for a while that she could earn anything while leaving Tyria, so unless she wanted to stay for another month or so, she really had no choice.

She squashed the thought that staying another month with Mercedes probably would have been very nice. In any case, Mercedes probably had better uses for her money than paying for Santana’s food and the damage Santana caused and encouraged Mercedes to cause to her liquor collection.

“I don’t suppose a job like that pays very much?”

Burt quoted a figure. It wasn’t much, obviously; he was a ruler with treasuries to mind, not a noble with large estates to exploit. But it was more than Santana would have expected to be offered, and it was most definitely more than she’d need to tide her over in Tampea while she searched for her next job.

“That’s quite fine,” she said. “I’ll take it. When’s the regiment due to leave?”

“Next week.”

That suited her just fine; it allowed her the time to get used to early mornings and harsher daily routines again, and also to come up with something nice to gift to her new friends so that they could at least remember her even if their paths never happened to cross again.

“That’s very nice of you, Santana,” Mercedes said as Santana pointed her towards the buttered potatoes Mercedes was fond of that Santana had bought her. “Thank you.”

“There’s some money underneath.” Santana turned to look at Mercedes from her position on the sofa. “Friends don’t live off of each other for weeks, if memory serves.”

Mercedes lifted the potatoes and collected the coins underneath, coming to drop them on Santana’s chest.

“Friends also don’t expect payment for helping each other out.”

Santana flashed her a smile, but left it at that. It was true, of course, and Mercedes would do well to remember it when she’d wonder why the coins she’d paid Santana for guarding her would be on her pillow when she’d come back from seeing Santana off.

The goodbyes weren’t tearful (well, Tina cried and Kurt looked like he’d join her any minute, but they were like that), but if Santana looked more sombre than usual on her first day as lieutenant of the Tyrian army, well, that was a very prestigious post and she should take it seriously, right?

It wasn’t the first national army she’d been in, and it wasn’t like soldiers were that different, no matter who had hired them. However, it was a pleasant surprise that some of her direct subordinates were really quite capable and good company.

“Must be quite boring for you,” Matt remarked one evening when they were playing cards in her tent. “After all those battles and covert stuff, just following an army as it marches to the coast.”

Santana raised an eyebrow. “How many battles have you been in in your life?”

Matt looked down at his cards. “Three.”

“They get real old real fast once you go to enough of them, you’ll see.” She wasn’t feeling harsh, so she didn’t add that they would get even older even faster for Matt, who was the sort of pleasant person to make friends among the people he worked with. “It’s quite pleasant to actually have a job where I don’t have to assume someone’s going to die before it’s over.”

Matt nodded in acknowledgement.

“And the other jobs?” Kitty asked from her right. “Working with high and mighty nobles must be interesting, right?”

“Tell you a secret.” Santana set her cards face down on the table so that they couldn’t peek at them, just in case. “Nobles are exactly as boring as everyone else, except they’ve got enough money to get a bunch of people to pretend they’re not, which leads to them starting to believe it themselves, which in turn makes them both boring _and_ overly self-important. Trust me, my work’s not nearly as exciting as people always think it is.”

To their credit, they seemed to believe her without arguing, and they went back to the game.

It had been a while since Santana had had a job where she was in charge of that large a group, and she’d forgotten how much she enjoyed it, especially when the people who were supposed to pass on her orders were actually capable of doing so. There was always the matter of showing to the troops who was leading them, of course, but Santana had masterminded heists that were still the talk of the town in certain cities; outwitting a bunch of regular soldiers into following her was no hard task as long as the foundation was laid correctly. And Santana was an excellent builder.

She got her chance to solidify it when she heard (she would owe Kitty for the warning; it would have worked out even without, but it was always good to know beforehand) of the prank some of the guards were planning to play on her.

They’d never make it anywhere that would require them to be sneaky; neither of them could hold back their snickers as she greeted them on the way to her tent. Likewise, she could see the faint squirming movement under her blanket even before she lifted it to find the forest snake, quite formidable in looks but utterly harmless, that the guards had trapped between the covers.

It was a fine specimen, she’d have to give them that, with the teeth sticking out of its mouth particularly noteworthy and the black markings on its body easily visible. As it realised it was no longer constrained under the tightly held sheet, it slithered to the floor, but Santana quickly won its heart by tossing it a few pieces of meat the cook had provided her with.

The guards’ faces when they saw her emerge from the tent with the snake casually draped over her shoulders (they’d been oh-so-very conspicuously listening for the scream that didn’t come; had she been more merciful she’d have been sorry for their spoiled fun) would keep her amused for years to come; they paled, tried to pretend they didn’t, wanted to be bewildered but weren’t sure if they could do so without losing face, didn’t know if they could be surprised and what that would give away.

“I forgot to tell you,” Santana said, “the schedule’s changed; Montgomery and Sanchez will relieve you when the sun rises.”

The guards glanced at each other.

“Ummm, Lieutenant,” the apparently braver one said, “you have a-“

“Oh, her,” Santana said, smiling at the snake and carefully stroking at its side. “Isn’t she lovely? I think she’s the same one I fought with over a few dead rats a couple of years ago in these forests. I’m glad she’s not holding a grudge.”

The guards gulped audibly.

“But wonderful as she is,” Santana said, crouching down and letting the snake slither into the grass, “I rather think I’d rather not share my bed with her tonight. Guard her well, though; she’s an old friend.”

She threw a couple more bits of meat at the guards, waved a cheerful goodbye at the snake (already well on its way away) and went back inside, wondering what sort of noise she could make without suspicions to cover up the sound of her own giggles.

As she’d assumed, sunrise brought her two shaking guards full of apologies for having lost her snake (some of them were clearly for the initial prank, but she feigned not noticing).

“But that won’t do at all,” she said and put them to work trying to find it. She could hide her amusement until lunchtime when she walked up to them with the snake around her shoulders once again (unlike the guards, she knew a thing or two about snakes; it had been easy enough to find it on a nearby rock soon after the sun had begun warming it) and told them they could stop the search as her friend had returned of its own volition.

The cook had prepared vegetable broth and bread (Santana would have to thank him with a small gift), so there was nothing to tempt the snake, further pacified by a few pieces of meat Santana fed to it before leaving her tent, to misbehave while it rode on Santana’s shoulders for the duration of the meal which Santana had taken to enjoying in the company of her soldiers. No one said anything, confirming her suspicions that the pranksters had bragged of their wit before they had anything to show for it, but she could see many a soldier walking up to the hapless guards to punch them on the shoulder and say something before walking away laughing.

She led the snake go afterwards, making sure there were a few witnesses who’d swear to her hissing at it for a while before that and to whom Santana told the snake had had to go off because it needed to fight off a nearby mink who’d been encroaching on its territory.

There were no prank attempts after that, and no one tried in any way to disrespect her either.

“You’re going to be a legend,” Matt said at their next card night. “Seriously, you could probably ask a bunch of them to follow you as your private army and they would. That was pretty epic.”

“I just hung out with an old friend for a few days,” Santana deflected, and if her look was just a little too innocent, well, it was all in the eye of the beholder.

“No, seriously,” Kitty said. “I can really understand why they’re considering you for Hagberg’s job.”

Santana raised her eyebrows. “Who is they and what are they considering?”

Kitty bit her lip, obviously frustrated with herself, but Matt simply clapped her on the shoulder. “We had a good run hiding it while it lasted,” he told her before turning to Santana. “Hagberg leads one of the units, the one the government sends when you don’t need the whole army, but she’s getting senile and soon enough she’s going to need a replacement. Burt thought you might be the person for the job.”

“Well I hope he’s happy with his test run.” Santana laughed. “What’s got him thinking I want to pick up where a senile officer has left off?”

“It was simply an idea,” Kitty said. “Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. You’re a natural leader.”

“And a fixed home might suit you,” Matt said. “Don’t you ever wish you could own a little more than you can carry on your back?”

“Sometimes,” Santana said. “But how would I gather the liquor collection I’ve always dreamt of if I couldn’t travel as much as I do now?”

Matt conceded her point and the conversation shifted into other topics.

—-

Santana couldn’t quite shake the suggestion from her mind, though. She’d considered more permanent jobs earlier, too; she was good, people had a tendency to want to secure her services. But the perks of her current lifestyle had always won out in the end. She was a wild cat, not some domesticated ball of fur who’d be able to look out the same window day in and day out.

This time, though, she also thought about being able to come home from a longer campaign and call on Mercedes or Kurt or Tina, or all three at once, to complain about the worst parts and to get an audience to everything she’d done well. She might even have a nice bed to dream of when she was away.

In that brief dream, there was someone warm in the bed to curl up around when she slipped under the covers, but Santana ignored that.

—-

They arrived in Tampea right on schedule, and Santana had the pleasure to present Lieutenant Puckerman (‘just call me Jake’) with his regiment and to accept his invitation to dinner later in the evening.

She arrived punctually and was disappointed with neither the quantity nor quality of the offerings.

“I heard a lot about you from my officers,” Jake said as they were starting on the turkey. “Gosh I wished I’d have been there for that snake stunt.”

“You can always hope they repeat it on someone else.”

Jake gave her a look. “No, they won’t.”

Santana swallowed another forkful and reached for her glass. “So, did your officers tell you enough to allow you to decide whether to recommend me for a job of not?”

To his credit, Jake barely blinked. “I see someone let it slip.”

“That, and I was already wandering what kind of a military needs a new person to walk a regiment to another country when there’s no fight in sight.”

“Please tell me you’re taking the job. After this, we’re just going to measure all other candidates up to you, and I don’t think a lot of them will fare well in the comparison.”

“Well,” Santana said, “then you’re just going to have to prepare for disappointment, because I’m not quite ready to settle down yet.”

“I see.” Jake sighed. “Anything I can do to change your mind?”

“Absolutely nothing. Your turkey’s delicious, though.”

They chatted for the rest of the meal as well, polite things but most certainly not what Jake had expected to talk about, that much was obvious.

“Hey, Santana,” he said after Santana had set down her dessert spoon and was getting ready to leave. “It’s been a pleasure. If you ever do feel ready to settle down, I know a country whose army would love to have you.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

That was a promise she didn’t quite intend to keep. In fact, she was working very hard to push it out of her mind as she walked down the street, so hard that it took her quite some time to realise that someone was shouting her name.

She’d just been toying with the idea of trying to find a good pub. Seemed like that was no longer necessary.

“Hello, Brittany,” she said. “Long time, no see.”

“I could show it to you again if you’d like.”

Brittany was still the same; bright, bubbly and in possession of whatever quality it was that made Santana inexplicably happy just to see her there. This time, it was her who took Santana to the inn where she was staying, but if anything else was different at all, it was simply that it had been a while since Santana had been with anyone like that; it was quite natural she’d want to be thorough and take her time.

Just that. Nothing else.

“So,” she asked later as she was braiding Brittany’s hair, “what have you been up to since we last met?”

Brittany sighed, like Santana had brought up bad memories, and Santana had just opened her mouth to tell her she didn’t have to answer the question when Brittany said, “I left my ship.”

Santana’s hands stopped. That wasn’t something she’d ever expected Brittany to say. “How so? You seemed to love it the last time I saw you.”

There was the faintest hint of a sniffle in Brittany’s voice. “I did. I still do, because love doesn’t just go away when you leave someone, does it?” Santana shrugged her shoulders – Brittany was probably right – and resumed braiding, if only because she thought it might be soothing. “John left the ship because his mother fell ill and he needed to go take care of her, so the captain hired someone new.” Brittany bit her lip. “He wasn’t nearly as nice and his knots were uglier, too.”

“So you left because you didn’t like him?”

It didn’t sound like Brittany. Inasmuch as Santana even knew Brittany well enough to be in the position to comment on that, she reminded herself quickly. It was something Santana would do in a heartbeat, but she’d always taken Brittany to be fairly devoted to the ship. Family was family even if you hated them a little and all that.

“A little.” Brittany sniffled again. “But he was super mean to me and he didn’t get that I didn’t want to sleep with him.” She paused for a second. “And none of the others told him to quit it. That’s why I left, really.”

Santana let go of Brittany’s hair to pull her into a hug. Brittany’s hands rested in her lap, fiddling with the blanket covering her, but she pushed her head against Santana’s shoulder, burying it there so that her face was not visible.

It wasn’t all that surprising, really, when Santana thought about it. Had she got attached to any of the men she worked with, she’d probably have a dozen experiences like that; the only reason she hadn’t was that she’d never expected them to place her above whatever snot-nosed new recruit came along. Then again, she’d never spent years with the same people; it wasn’t like Brittany hadn’t been asking for anything more than basic human decency, and Santana had to fight down the impulse to track down that ship and shoot it full of cannon holes.

“Oh, Brittany,” she said. “I’m sorry. If they can’t treat you right, then they didn’t deserve you anyway.”

Brittany mumbled something against her shoulder, then moved her head so that it was simply her cheek against Santana’s skin.

“But I wanted them to deserve me,” she said in a small voice. “And they didn’t even care as long as he still played poker with them.”

“I know, I know.” Santana ran her hand up and down soothingly along Brittany’s back. “It’s going to be okay. You’ll find another ship whose crew is worthy of you.”

Brittany shook her head. “I don’t think I want another ship. I’ll just have to go say hi to the fish along the coast. It’s okay because you can see more of them there anyway.”

“What do you want, then?”

“I don’t know.” Brittany looked up to her pleadingly. “Do I have to know now?”

“Of course not.” Carefully, she guided Brittany down to lie on the bed so that they could look each other in the eye while Santana held her. “You can take as much time as you need, Brittany. I’ll be in town for some time, I think. Wanna think about it together?”

Whatever doubts she might have had about saying those words were immediately forgotten as the smile returned to Brittany’s face and she darted forwards to quickly press her lips to Santana’s.

“I bet you’re an excellent planner,” she said.

“You know what? Yes, I’m great at planning.”

She didn’t know what to say after that, but it didn’t seem like Brittany was expecting her to say anything at all. They lay like that, snuggling into each other, for some time until Brittany broke the silence.

“Do you want to stay here? The innkeeper lets me have the room without paying because I helped her once when her crew didn’t.”

It wasn’t a very tough decision; Santana was always up for things that were free without something fishy about them (pun probably not intended), and it wasn’t like Brittany’s presence was exactly a drawback.

“Yes,” she said. “I think I’d like that.”

Brittany snuggled closer to her and soon enough, Santana could hear her breathing turn steady. She rested her head against Brittany’s and that was the last thing she remembered before falling asleep herself.

—-

When she’d said yes, Santana had mostly been thinking about staying with Brittany in the room, whether it be to have sex or to do any of the many other intimate things you could do behind closed doors.

What she’d neglected to imagine, though, was everything they’d do together outside of the inn. Whatever Brittany had done for the innkeeper (and Santana couldn’t shake the chilling feeling that she knew), it hadn’t made her offer Brittany meals as well, so they often went to the market together to buy things for them to eat. Santana had never been a big market person, mostly because her pay usually included upkeep and outside of work she’d preferred local cuisine made by someone else. It didn’t take even two days, though, before she found herself giggling over apples with Brittany and comparing which bread seemed more likely to still taste good after seven days. Brittany knew the town better than she did, and she showed Santana around (their walk in the harbour was rather melancholic, but Santana had to admit the town hall clock was very amusing). All that was vaguely reminiscent of her time in Tyria, but still completely different. Santana wanted to attribute that to the fact that at the end of the day Mercedes was thoroughly uninterested in sharing her bed with Santana, but while she’d really enjoyed her time with her friends, they just hadn’t been able to make her stomach swoop the way Brittany’s smile could.

The perhaps most bizarre experience was going to a pub with Brittany. She remembered (although she couldn’t bother to count how much time ago it had been) looking at Brittany and deciding that she’d do for the night, and seeing Brittany now, smiling at her from the other side of the table like nothing had changed while everything had was mind-reeling. Santana had never really understood why couples wanted romantic outings, but if they made people feel like she felt right then, perhaps she understood just the tiniest bit.

“You,” said a voice that was decidedly not Brittany’s, breaking the moment. “You’re who I think you are, right?”

Hiding her annoyance, Santana turned to the speaker. “I’m hardly the right person to answer that question.”

The man who’d spoken to her looked so much like every disreputable soldier Santana had ever dealt with that she wasn’t even quite sure if she’d met him before or not. Probably not, she thought. People tended to remember her name and have no problem calling her by that if they’d actually worked with her.

The man faltered a little, obviously not having expected to be talked back at like that, but after a moment he seemed to decide to soldier on.

“Santana Lopez?”

“That’s me,” Santana said. “See, next time you have a question, ask one someone other than you can answer.”

The man’s lip curled up in dislike, but that didn’t prevent him from saying, “I’ve got a job for you.”

“Many people do.” She liked to follow her gut feeling, and this man’s comportment was not exactly helping his case. “What makes you so special?”

The man sat down without being asked to and told her about the job. It was standard secretive stuff; there wasn’t even really any challenge in it, which might have been the only thing to convince Santana to go for it.

“Look elsewhere,” Santana said without even glancing at the man. “I just finished my last one, and I’m not going to give up my well-earned rest for you.”

“You should.” The man’s tone was slightly sinister, but it was so while the man himself was standing up, so his threat fell a little flat. “You really should.”

“Get lost,” Santana said, making a shooing motion with her hand. “I’m not interested.”

The man probably thought that his look was one of noble disdain and put Santana in her place, but his last words before he disappeared into the crowd (“If you change your mind, just call on Paul in the inn of the butcher district!”) ruined whatever little bits of that he managed to pull off.

“Well he wasn’t very pleasant,” Brittany observed mildly and blew into her glass.

“He most definitely was not.” Santana brushed her foot against Brittany’s ankle. “Do you want to leave before he comes back?”

“Are you asking because you’re scared he’ll do something to me or because you want to go home to do what we do every night?” Brittany asked, blinking. “And a lot of the mornings, too.”

Santana laughed. “I was thinking of you being afraid of the former, but to be honest right now all I can think about is the latter, so a little bit of both I guess?”

“That sounds good,” Brittany said. “It would sound good anyway because you say it and your voice is lovely, but I also like what you’re saying.”

Santana downed her glass. “Let’s get out of here,” she said, taking Brittany’s hand and leading her out of the pub.

—-

Santana had never really had much chance to ponder at her career choices; her current one had fallen into her lap kind of by accident as she realised she was good at it at a time when she was desperate to have something at least, and it was the only one she’d known since she’d stopped helping out her family- But she didn’t want to think about that.

The point was, despite her planning skills she was quite possibly the worst person to aid Brittany to come up with something else she could do if she really didn’t want to continue being a sailor, simply because she had never spent very much time wondering about what sort of things there were out there that someone could do for a living.

“There’s sewing,” she said. “I saw you patching up some of your clothes, is that something that you like?”

Brittany shook her head. “No, not really.”

“Uhhh- Do you like animals?” She seemed like she would. “They need to be taken care of, there’s lots of work in that.”

This one, Brittany seemed to actually consider. “I do like animals,” she said. “But I don’t know, I still miss fish and it might get too sad.”

Santana was just opening her mouth to suggest aiding in governance, but she realised what she was doing right before and closed it again.

“A lot of the artisans need someone helping out at the shop,” she said. “Maybe even to learn the craft. How about that?”

“Maybe.” Brittany pursed her lips. “I’ll have to think of that.”

“Well it’s not like you have to decide now,” Santana said. “You’ve got your free lodgings, and we’ve got quite a lot of money for food; you’ve got time.”

Brittany nodded and laid down on the bed next to Santana.

“I know a few ways to pass it,” she said very seriously, but the effect was a little ruined by how quickly she darted forwards to kiss Santana.

—-

“Did you get everything?”

“I left the dead flies we found among the apples in the corner for the nice spider, but the other stuff, I did.”

“That’s okay, I don’t think we’d have found much use for the flies anyway.”

She offered Brittany her hand and Brittany took it after switching the picnic basket to her other hand.

Martha, the innkeeper, was downstairs inspecting something on the ceiling when they walked past, and she smiled at them with a meaningful look at the basket. Santana had no idea what that was supposed to mean, but it hardly mattered anyway.

“Are we on our way to another secret cove, or are you still going to keep it a secret?” she asked Brittany once they were on the street.

“Still a secret,” Brittany said happily. “But I can tell you that it’s another pretty place and I’m sure you’ll like it. Plus,” she added, “no one ever goes there.”

She didn’t have to spell out the implications of that.

Brittany led her to the edges of the city and then picked a path that seemed to go into the direction of the sea. Santana, having taken up carrying the basket in her turn, glanced at it and wondered how something could feel so different yet like nothing had changed at all. It wasn’t really something she wanted to think about too much – she’d never really liked philosophy – but the thought wouldn’t quit her until Brittany pointed out a view to the nearby hills that was particularly beautiful.

This time, Brittany’s mysterious path didn’t lead to a cove. Instead, when they emerged from the woods it was at the edge of a cliff, the sea stretching out below them, its vastness so much easier to perceive from up there than from water-level at ports. Santana had to seriously work not to let her jaw drop open, and she stopped walking, captivated by the view until she forced herself to shake it off. There was a tree that Brittany led her to, and they settled down in its shadow.

Brittany made a gesture at the sea. “It’s pretty, isn’t it?”

“Breath-taking.” Santana reached for Brittany’s hand. “I could look at it all day.”

“That’s fine with me,” Brittany said, “as long as you sometimes glance at me. I like it when you watch me.”

“Well it’s good for you that you’re breath-taking, too.” Santana squeezed her hand.

“And it’s good that you like the view so much, because then you’ll stay still and I can easily look at you while you look at it, because you’re even more beautiful.”

Santana ducked her head. “We’ll just have to agree to disagree, I guess.”

“I like that,” Brittany said and began unloading their picnic basket.

Santana had never really done the courting thing, mostly because she’d never felt the inclination to. It had always appeared to her as rather foolish and too time-consuming. What was the point if you could just skip most of the niceties, enjoy what you’d come for and then exchange goodbyes, if even that?

To be fair, the feeling at the pit of her stomach when she exchanged kisses with Brittany that were coloured by the berries they were eating at the same time was probably foolish, too, but that didn’t mean she didn’t enjoy it.

“You’ve got something on your nose,” Brittany said after one such kiss.

“That is such a line.” Santana laughed. “I should know, I’ve used every single one in the book.”

“I’ve never really had any books, but that’s most definitely berry.” Brittany giggled a little. “Can I kiss it off?”

Santana snorted, but even she couldn’t tell herself there was any meanness behind it. “Be my guest.”

Brittany placed a gentle kiss on the top of her nose, and Santana could feel her tongue licking quickly at her skin.

“Did you get it off?”

Brittany tilted her head as if assessing her work. “No. It’s worse now because my tongue was all blue from the berries as well and I licked at your nose. The smudge just got larger.”

Santana hid her face against the blanket they were lounging on and giggled.

“It’s a little better now,” Brittany said once she raised her head again. “I think it rubbed off on the blanket, but some of it is on your cheek now.”

Santana gave her one of her more seducing smiles, except it probably came off differently when she was doing her hardest not to laugh at the same time. “You could try kissing it off.”

Brittany’s eyes lit up. “That’s a great idea,” she said, tackling Santana to the blanket again.

They stayed there until the sun began to set down, and even then only slowly gathered their things, admiring the way the sun seemed to set into the ocean.

“Look at those colours,” Santana said, pointing at a spot on the horizon. “Isn’t that beautiful?”

“It is.” Brittany reached for Santana’s hand. “I’ve seen it lots of times but somehow it’s always so great.”

Of course she would have. She’d been a sailor; for some reason (probably because she’d been so captivated by the sight herself, having never really paid attention to things like the sun while she was on board herself) Santana hadn’t realised that would mean she would have seen the sun set over the sea more times than she could count. And knowing Brittany, she’d watched and cherished each one of them.

“I used to think you were the sun,” Brittany said, shaking the thought out of Santana’s head. “And then I thought I was the sea and how pretty and nice it was when we got together.”

“I did have a great time today,” Santana said, squeezing Brittany’s hand.

“So did I.”

—-

“Damn.” Santana looked around among the food items. “I forgot all about bread.”

“We could always eat just apples,” Brittany said, apparently deciding to live as she preached and biting into one. “Bread is just the thing you put other stuff onto.”

“There’s this one bread that’s really good.” She took an apple as well and sat down next to Brittany. “They make it- Gosh, I’ve forgotten where, but it’s really good and they give it to soldiers as munitions and that was seriously one of the best jobs I’ve ever had.”

“We went to this island once.” Brittany threw her head back. “They had the best biscuits ever but for some reason you weren’t allowed to ship them off the island and we never went back, so now I’ll always be haunted by the idea of world’s best biscuits that I cannot get my hands on.”

“Such is the cost of travel,” Santana said and patted her on the back in an odd mix of mocking the gesture and genuine commiseration.

“If only we could have everything that we like from all around the world in one place,” Brittany’s tone turned pensive, “I’d never want to travel again.”

“Maybe that’s why we can’t do that.” Santana sighed. “Would those biscuits still taste like the world’s best biscuits if you had them every day?”

“Yes,” Brittany said with conviction. “They’re the world’s best biscuits, and I’ve eaten a lot of biscuits so I know about these things. If I could have them every day, I’d just discover different great things about them every time I ate them.”

“Maybe,” Santana said. She’d never really thought about it like that.

“But since I can’t have them,” Brittany reached for the packet Santana had remembered from the bakery, “I think these taste just fine when you’re there complaining to me about how I get crumbs on the bed.”

“But you do get crumbs on the bed.” Santana made a face and pretended to wrestle the packet out of Brittany’s hand, pulling Brittany onto the floor with her, careful not to make either of them actually fall. “Now’s better,” she said, throwing her arms around Brittany’s waist. “Eat away.”

“If these are for dinner, can I have you for dessert?”

“Anytime you like.”

—-

“I’m going to need a moment,” Santana said, beyond caring about how obvious her voice made it what they’d been up to. “You’re- Damn, that was-“

“I know.” Brittany plopped down next to her. “I’m wonderful. It’s okay; you’re wonderful too.”

“Just give me that moment and I’ll be wonderful all up in your-“

She didn’t have the energy to finish the sentence.

Brittany seemed to take her more seriously than she’d intended and said nothing for a few moments. Then it seemed like her thoughts had become too important to keep to herself and she said, “I’ve been thinking about what I’ll do if I’ll never be a sailor again.”

“Mmmmmm?”

“I’d like animals. And helping shopkeepers would be fine too. Where’re we going to go next? I guess it should be something that people do there.”

It was a simple enough question, and perhaps Santana should have been surprised Brittany hadn’t said anything to that end sooner.

But in its simplicity, it was like throwing a bucket full of ice water on Santana. Given the last couple of weeks, what would be more logical than for Brittany to assume they’d be together from there on, not just get off on each other when they happened to bump into each other on some nameless street in a nameless town?

Santana didn’t do that. She didn’t do together.

“We,” she said, sitting up and feeling re-energised in the worst way possible all of a sudden, “are not going anywhere. _I_ am going to find a job that I should have sought out over a week ago, and then I’ll be gone. Just like always.” She got off the bed and began searching for her clothes. “I don’t know what you’re going to do and I don’t care. It’s not my style.”

Brittany didn’t move from the bed, and as long as Santana didn’t properly look into her eyes, it was easy to pretend she didn’t even properly understand what was going on.

“But you said you’d help me plan,” Brittany said eventually as Santana had got dressed and was scanning the room for any other stuff of hers she needed and hadn’t acquired within two weeks.

“Well here’s your first lesson to mercenaries.” She didn’t stop to look at Brittany. It was probably better that way. “Planning is one thing. Doing it is totally another.”

She didn’t say goodbye when she slammed the door shut as she left, and Brittany didn’t try to run after her.

If there was something wet on her cheek when she rushed down the street, then that damn inn had to have had a leaky roof.

The first thing she did after running far away enough that Brittany wouldn’t find her if she changed her mind about chasing her was taking a bath. She smelt like Brittany, and what worse, she smelt like sex, and where she was going, that was a weakness, at least for her.

The inn was easy enough to find, and the man himself even easier considering that he was sitting on the front porch. Santana noticed him first, but it didn’t take long for him to recognise Santana. The determined (and probably quite scary) aura around her probably helped.

“I swear I didn’t-“

“Whatever it is, I’m not here about that.” She leaned against the support pole of the porch. “Your job still on?”

Paul’s eyes widened, but he covered it soon enough, adopting a smirk that wasn’t nearly confident enough to convince anyone he hadn’t expected to be beaten just a moment ago.

“As it happens, it is. What? You suddenly want in?”

“That’s exactly what I want. Sit down and talk.”

And Paul did.

—-

“Just so you know,” Santana said some days later as she was wedged between the wall of a town hall and the building next to it, scrambling her way up on the off-chance that someone might have forgotten something somewhere where she could find it. “I’m never going to work with you again.”

She didn’t hear what Paul mumbled, but she also didn’t care at all.

—-

The job, as they sometimes did, went south really quickly. One moment she was hanging by a rope and reaching for Paul’s hand to help her get up to the roof, the second there were guards yelling at them on the ground and Paul had disappeared, probably having got scared and run off.

Santana looked down at the guards, and then at her hand that was holding onto the edge of the roof. She’d already climbed up, and that had been tough; she probably didn’t have the strength to wait there until they’d get up to help her away and charge her.

In other words, she was about to die. Just another Wednesday on the job.

But what made her good, what made her special, was that she could turn a Wednesday when she was dying into a Friday that she spent drinking to simultaneously celebrate that she was still alive and calm down her nerves from having almost died. There was a window some distance away from where she was hanging, and Santana took a deep breath and started moving her hands, eyes focused on it and ignoring everything else. She got to it, and after some manoeuvring that she probably should have been too tired to do, she was inside. The guards had sent some of their own up to the roof to help her up, and it was a simple enough job to wait until they had run up to run down and leave by the back door, helpfully left unguarded by a bunch of idiots who didn’t realise that the person they were supposed to catch could also move.

They were probably a lot placated, though, by the present of a man by the name of Paul, with elaborate plans in his pocket, mysteriously left tied up on the steps of their leader’s house and found Saturday morning. If any of them had seen or remembered her face, Santana highly doubted they were very eager to search her out after that.

By Monday, she had another job, and this one she made sure went off without a hitch. After that, it was another, and another, and another, all quick jobs that she executed with ruthless precision and attention to detail that surpassed even her usual standards. If she’d failed once, it was only because her employer had been idiot enough to get spooked and leave her to take the oh-so-very-literal fall, not because she couldn’t do the job.

She could do it for the rest of her life, she thought as she downed a well-deserved shot after her latest job.

The pub was small but their liquor selection was good, and Santana had a little bit of everything and a good look at the woman serving the drinks, and that look was not one-sided.

“We stop serving a little before midnight,” she said as she passed Santana the fifth time. “You can stay for a little while longer if you’d like.”

The look in her eye left no questions about what she meant.

It was a very tempting offer, Santana couldn’t deny that. The barmaid was undeniably gorgeous, with a firmness to her dealings with the drunkards she was serving that Santana liked and well-kept, clean hands, not to mention the quite explicit hint that Santana wouldn’t be expected to be there the following morning. She’d be a fool not to go for that.

She could do this for the rest of her life.

But, Santana realised as the faintest flash of a sailor’s work overalls – stupid, so stupid; it wasn’t like that would still signal Brittany anyway, she was done with that particular career – caught her eye and quite literally made her turn away from the barmaid, ‘could’ had never meant ‘should’, let alone ‘wanted’.

Perhaps she’d once been satisfied with the idea of dying the way she’d lived for so long, without having ever grown new roots after her old ones had been so brutally burnt and all of her things fitting into a satchel. Now, though, if she went on, the only thing she’d be doing would be running away from something that she wanted because she was too afraid it wouldn’t work out.

And if one thing could be said for Santana Lopez, it was that she didn’t admit to fear. If she found one, she killed it. Never mind that the fear had been there half her life. She’d found it now, and she’d confront it now.

She was up from her chair before she even realised it, and out the door without even explaining herself to the barmaid who probably thought she’d simply been too forwards.

That mattered very little. Santana was out of town before the first bell tolled to signal midnight.

—-

“She’s not here anymore.”

Martha might have as well been throwing daggers at Santana; that was the gist of her message anyway, if her eyes were anything to go by.

Neither her words nor her feelings towards Santana were surprising. Brittany probably hadn’t wanted to stay in the room that she’d shared with Santana after Santana left; it was inconvenient but quite unavoidable. And while Brittany was many things, good with secrets (if Santana could even claim that what had gone down between the two of them was a secret; Brittany had all the rights to be loudly upset about it) was not one. Of course she’d told Martha; they were friends, at least by Brittany’s description which probably was rather loose, and anyway who didn’t talk when they were upset? (Well, Santana. Or so she liked to think.)

Not all hope was completely lost, though, since at least Brittany hadn’t told her not to say anything about where she’d gone (then again, such a thing probably wouldn’t even occur to Brittany; she had never had problems with openness).

“I’m so sorry about the way I treated her,” Santana told Martha who looked quite unmoved. “That’s why I’m searching for her, to tell her how sorry I am.”

She had to speak for a long time and with all the eloquence she could muster, but after enough contrite behaviour and explanations, Martha pursed her lips and said, “She spoke of a town some way up north. I think she had a friend there.”

Santana noted down the name of the town. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

“She didn’t really want to stay put,” Martha said with a pointed glare, “not after what happened. I don’t know if she’s even there anymore.”

Brittany’s friend, whoever that might be (either Santana’s behaviour was not contrite enough for Martha to share the details or then she genuinely did not know; either was possible when it came to Brittany), lived in a town large enough that searching house by house was out of the question as Santana quickly realised as she walked around. She spent a few days keeping an eye on the main market, since Brittany liked them and she would need to eat, however sad she was. But either she’d underestimated Brittany’s heartbreak (and wasn’t that a thought to make Santana’s insides turn cold, both out of guilt and from the conviction that Brittany’s forgiveness had to have a limit) or then it was only Brittany’s friend who bought food for the two of them, because in all her time there, Santana didn’t see even a flash of Brittany.

It was of course possible that she’d have changed towns again, for whatever reason, but Santana knew nothing of Brittany’s friend and trying to search for someone with a blonde friend was like searching for a needle in the haystack, which was only her last resort option.

She’d have to think like Brittany, Santana thought as she was staring at her hands at the edge of her bed. Brittany was not like everyone else she knew, not like the people she was used to tracking down. She was sad, heartbroken and hurt; where would she go?

As the answer hit her, she felt utterly foolish for not having thought of it sooner.

Brittany would go to the sea.

Not in the melodramatic way of literally drowning her sorrows, of course (or at least so Santana had to hope), but she knew the coast surrounding most port cities as well as she knew the ship routes, and she would seek comfort from the familiar sight of water as far as her eyes could see.

Her sudden realisation didn’t mean she immediately found Brittany, though. Santana herself was more of a town girl, not so much the hiking type aside from work, and while Brittany made it look easy to pick a path and walk it until a breath-taking sight appeared before her, it turned out that ability was like all magic tricks; result of hours of practice, in this case climbing rocks and searching paths that did eventually reach the sea but not Brittany.

Santana was lucky she’d always had to work for what she had; had she been not, she might have given up after few hours of rounding rocks (of course Brittany had picked a town with the rockiest shores imaginable, with many nooks and crannies where someone her size could easily curl up to cry, not ones with neat cliffs that you could scan for miles with one look) and feeling vaguely hopeful over seeing from a distance something that turned out to be a bunch of water plants washed ashore.

She did find a few nice places of her own, ones that brought a small sad smile to her face as she thought about how Brittany probably knew them too, but which she regardless used to rest her eyes on while munching mechanically on her lunch and dinner, her mind already drafting the search plan for the rest of the day.

Brittany was not on the southern side of the town, so after verifying that, Santana moved north. The area was just like the southern side, except larger, but she went on, resolutely not thinking of the possibility that Brittany might be moving instead of staying fixed on one spot. She’d deal with that once she’d have searched everywhere once.

It was on the fifth day of her search, just as her stomach was starting to remind her that dinner had been hours ago and that it needed food regularly to be able to provide her legs with the energy to move, just a little before the sunset that would force Santana to stop her search for the day, when Santana walked round a large rock and saw Brittany not thirty feet away.

She was sitting on a rock, right on top so that she’d probably have been visible from far away if there was higher ground anywhere for Santana to look from, but the time she might have saved was the furthest thing away from Santana’s mind. She’d found her now; that was all that mattered. That, and what Brittany would have to say to her.

Brittany hadn’t noticed her, looking at the waves crashing against the lower rocks with eyes that, Santana noticed as she got closer, looked like she didn’t actually see anything.

“It’s still beautiful,” she said, stopping a few feet away from Brittany. “The sunset over sea. Even if the sun is the most inconsiderate idiot in the whole universe and should not be allowed to even glance at the sea.”

She didn’t really know what she’d been expecting Brittany to do. Always getting ready for the worst, she’d thought maybe Brittany would glance at her before walking away without a word, which Santana would well deserve. She might reveal she’d been crying, and Santana would reassure her for as long as necessary until Brittany believed she wouldn’t leave again. In her more melancholic moments when she felt she’d definitely lost Brittany, she’d entertained the notion that Brittany wouldn’t believe her real; if mermaids existed, why not spirits who could reach out and touch you if they so wanted?

Brittany did none of that. She jumped up like she’d been burned, looked at Santana for a very short moment as if to verify that it was really her and launched at Santana, throwing her arms around Santana’s neck and pulling her close, burying her head to the crook of Santana’s neck and breathing in deeply.

Santana did the only thing she could; she put her arms gently around Brittany and held her close, rubbing her hand up and down Brittany’s back as if Brittany was a scared child who needed to be soothed.

“You came back,” Brittany said once her face moved so that her mouth wasn’t pressed against Santana’s skin anymore.

“I did.” She took a deep breath. “I’m so sorry, Brittany. I understand if you’re angry at me, and-“

“But I’m not.” Brittany shivered against her; it might have been the evening wind from the sea. “You came back.”

Santana shook her head. “But the things I said, and the way I left… You should be very angry with me, you have every right to be.”

Brittany pulled away, and Santana did her best to hide her sigh; she’d cut off the branch she’d been sitting on, hadn’t she? But Brittany didn’t leave, or even move further away. She simply sat down on the rock again and took Santana’s hand, pulling her down as well. Santana turned her hand and clasped Brittany’s tightly.

“I’m still a little sad,” Brittany said, “because I think I had a dream like this once, and then I woke up and you weren’t there pushing your cold toes against my feet and I was even sadder that day, but I’m not angry at you. I don’t think I ever were. Being angry is so difficult. You have to huff a lot and I don’t want to make anyone think I have a cold because then people will pretend not to avoid you.”

“Why?” Santana had to ask; she inched closer to Brittany, just in case. “I always knew you had a kind heart, but not being angry at how I treated you is not simply being kind-hearted, it’s like-“

She couldn’t really think of anything powerful enough.

“Do you know why I was where I was when we met?” Brittany asked. “The last time, not the first time. The first time I were there because I wanted a glass of juice and that’s not a very good story.”

Santana shook her head. “I just assumed you’d found someplace to live cheaply while you figured out your future.”

“That helped.” Brittany’s thumb run across Santana’s palm, and the shivers up Santana’s spine where most definitely not caused by the wind. “But I knew that a lot of the people from my ship knew about Martha because she sometimes made us breakfast, and I left the ship in that town so it would make a lot of sense. I wanted them to find me and I didn’t want it to be difficult.” Her shoulders sagged and she leaned into Santana. “I was waiting for them to come back and say they were sorry. I’d been waiting for quite a while when you found me. I wanted them to come back and be sorry and deserve me again.”

Santana moved her arm around Brittany’s waist. “I’m so sorry, Brittany. I hope their flour gets infested with worms, wherever they are.”

“That’s why I’m not angry at you,” Brittany said. “Not because of the worms, even though I like that about you, too. But you came back. I wanted you to deserve me, too, and you came back and searched for me, and I didn’t even make it easy for you.”

“Five days.” Santana chuckled, feeling her heart beat a little easier. “This is the fifth day I’ve walked these rocks to find you, Brittany, and before that I searched the town like a fool. And when I went to see your friend Martha about your whereabouts, I didn’t dare drink the tea she offered me because I’m pretty sure she’d poisoned it to avenge my hurting you.”

“She gets like that.”

Brittany’s smile was a little too happy for the topic, but then again Santana wasn’t really feeling all too solemn about it either. They’d both been miserable enough as it was; how could two harmless smiles hurt?

“I have a why for you, too,” Brittany said once they managed to stop grinning at each other like fools.

Santana bit her lip. “Anything you want to know.”

“Why did you leave, and why are you back?” Brittany tightened her hold on the one of Santana’s hands that was still in hers. “Not that I’m not happy that you’re back, I just want to know so that I can soothe myself properly when I wake up and forget for a moment. Dreams don’t give you reasons, they just make you incredibly happy until you wake up.”

Santana was silent for a long while, trying to put it into words, but Brittany seemed content to give her all the time she needed, just slowly swaying her body from side to side like they were in a boat instead of on the steady rock.

“I’ve been alone for so long,” Santana said finally. “My family died when I was too young, and since then I haven’t had a home. I couldn’t, so I told myself I didn’t want to, and I rolled it all up in a neat package that offered me things I did in fact like to hide the ones I had to bear, and I pretended like that was all I had ever wanted from life.

And then you came along, and it took me a long time to realise, but you were slowly but surely unpacking all those things and making me discard the stuff I’d used to hide the things I didn’t like about my life, and the things I got in return were great but they only brought out better the things I’d wanted to hide. And then it all came to a head when I realised that I could have you do that for however long as I liked, and I couldn’t deal with it so I said all those horrible things and left before it was too late to pack up my old baggage again.”

Brittany nodded; without Santana realising it, she’d manoeuvred her hand to Santana’s shoulder and was gently patting at it now.

“But you came back,” she said.

“The job I took after I left you was a mess.” Santana ducked her head before forcing herself to look up again. “I ended up-“ No, she wouldn’t want to tell Brittany about how she might have died, not this time. “I couldn’t trust anyone, it turned out, and eventually I just walked out and took another one.”

“Was it as bad?”

“No, it was really good, actually. And so were quite a few after that. But then I just- I was at a pub, and I- I realised I just didn’t want that to be my whole life, even if it could be. I wanted you.”

“And a place where you could bring back good liquors and store them,” Brittany said. “But mostly me.”

Santana couldn’t help the smile. “Yes. That’s pretty much it.”

They sat in silence for a while.

“I’m really sorry,” Santana said to break it. “I know- That’s the explanation for why I did what I did, but you don’t have to- I know I hurt you, and you don’t have to forgive me for it just because I-“

“But I do forgive you.” Brittany tilted her head. “Don’t argue with me on that. I get to decide whether I’m angry or not, and I decide not to be.”

Santana let out a breath. “Okay. Thank you.”

Brittany snuggled a little closer, and they stayed like that for a while before curiosity got the better of Santana.

“So what did you do?” she asked. “While I was away. It was a few months; that’s a long time to sit on a rock and look at the sea.”

“The sea’s always different,” Brittany said. “Is it such a long time to watch as something changes?”

It was, but it also sounded like something Brittany would do, so Santana didn’t comment on it further.

“I stayed with Martha for a while,” Brittany said after a moment of silence. “Not for too long, because you’d never searched for me and I thought if we’d see each other again it’d be because we bumped into each other like always, so I thought I’d better change towns because I was sure you wouldn’t come where you thought I was.” She flashed a smile. “I’m so glad I was wrong.”

“I’m so glad I found you even if you weren’t trying to be found.”

“I sort of was. The first month I was here I tried to walk a lot in the town centre so that you’d appear out of nowhere and crash into me, but then I thought that maybe my lucky hourglass had ran out of sand and we weren’t going to meet like that anymore, and then I got sad and started coming here to watch the sea and the sunset.” Brittany’s tone turned happier. “And then you put new sand in the hourglass even though that’s almost impossible. I’m really happy about that right now.”

“Me too.”

They watched as the sun sunk into the sea (Santana made a mental note to make the joke to Brittany some time into the future when she’d have made sure Brittany knew she was there to stay), arms still around each other. It had been a while since Santana had felt so content by such a simple thing.

“What are we going to do now?” Brittany asked.

“We probably should head towards the town,” Santana said. “The sunset’s really pretty and everything, but after sunset it gets dark and I’d rather not lose my life balancing out on these rocks in complete darkness right after I’ve found some light in my life once again.”

Brittany beamed at her, but quickly went back to the conversation.

“I didn’t mean now-now,” she said. “I meant now that we deserve each other and are going to be together. Do you still want to do your travelling jobs?”

Santana swallowed around a sudden lump in her throat.

“Can we not talk about that for a while?” she asked eventually. “I don’t know, to be honest. I just know I want to be with you, and that we’ll both have to find work at some point because I don’t think we have enough money not to, but I’d just like- I’d just like a few weeks, like we had in Tampea, except that at the end of it I’m not going to run off but we’re going to talk about our future seriously and make some plans. Would that be okay?”

Brittany didn’t look totally happy, which was completely understandable considering what had happened the last time Santana had promised to make plans with her, but she nodded anyway. “I’m going to need a few days to realise I might not always be imagining your warmth anyway,” she said. “And I really liked picnics and going to the market with you. And I’ve found a lot of really pretty places here that I’d like to show you so you can compliment me and the view at the same time again.”

“I found some nice places too, while I was looking for you, and I’m sure that they’d be even nicer if I looked at them with you.”

That seemed to make Brittany happy enough, but Santana couldn’t quite shake her earlier look.

“Do you want to talk about what you’ve thought about your new career?” she asked after a moment of silence. “I’d rather not talk of my future since I’d simply like to enjoy the present for now, but I want to hear everything about you.”

It seemed to have been a good thing to say; Brittany perked up, practically jumping a little. It looked absolutely adorable.

“I still don’t know,” Brittany said. “I can’t decide between the things we talked about, although I’m pretty sure part of it is because I didn’t want to part with any idea you gave me because I missed you so badly, and that’s not going to be a problem anymore. Maybe it’ll come to me.”

Santana let out a laugh. “Maybe.”

“But then I also think that maybe it doesn’t matter.” Brittany turned pensive. “If I can’t pick one, maybe it’s because I like all of them as much. That’s good, isn’t it, because if you need a certain place for what you want to do it’s good that I have many things I might want to do so that at least I’ll find work doing one of them.”

“That’s true.” Santana thought for a moment. “But I don’t want to dictate what we do. If you find something or someplace you really like, we can make sure that goes into our plans even if I’ll have to travel.”

“Thank you. But I haven’t really had a home that doesn’t move where the winds push it, so I don’t think I really care where my first one’s going to be as long as you’re there.”

They talked some more until Santana began looking around, noticing how much less she could make out of her surroundings than even just a little earlier.

“We should probably go,” she said. “Like I said, now that I’ve found you I’d rather keep on living with you than slip on a rock and crack my skull.”

“I know how to get back to the town.”

Brittany got up and offered Santana her hand to help her up as well. She could have easily got up by herself as well, but Santana took the offered hand. It was nice, to have such things given to her.

“Have you been living with a friend?” Santana asked as they started making their way towards the city. “Martha told me so, even if she didn’t know which friend.”

“Yes. But I don’t think you can come there tonight. Lord Tubbington will probably be very cross with you because I told him about what happened between us, and he can hold a grudge for so long.”

“It’s fine.” She hadn’t expected Brittany to even want to share her bed with Santana so quickly; there was no crushed hope there. “I’ve been living in an inn, and I can continue to do so. I’d just like to see you home safely.”

It was dark, and they were in the shadows, but she could still see the brightness of Brittany’s smile.

She did keep her word, seeing Brittany to the front porch of a house that looked rather humble to be housing a lord, but it wasn’t like weirder things hadn’t happened. Santana hadn’t expected to get anything except the pleasure of Brittany’s company for her troubles in making the detour on her own way home, but Brittany did lean forwards and press a quick, very innocent kiss to her lips before dancing towards the front door and turning to wave goodnight at Santana before she closed the door after herself.

Santana walked home, feeling like she was walking on clouds instead the cold hard ground, so surreal did the end of her day feel like when Brittany wasn’t physically there to make it more concrete and real that she’d found her, she’d found Brittany, and Brittany still wanted to be with her, even after everything that Santana had done to give her reasons to the contrary. It sort of made her want to laugh from pure, unadulterated happiness.

She didn’t, of course. She was Santana Lopez, and most of her future was up in the air, even if it all would have to lead back to one certain fixed point from now on; she wasn’t going to laugh in the middle of the street where anyone could see, not when she knew how easily rumours spread and she couldn’t for sure tell she wouldn’t have to work with some of the nondescript figures walking past her, all curled up in something because it was getting quite cold due to the late hour. But it had been such a long time since she’d even felt the urge, and that was enough for her to smile internally all the way to the inn where she was staying, up the stairs and into her room where she flopped down on the mattress, finally let her smile go as wide as she felt like and let out the dreamy, hopeful sigh she’d been holding onto since Brittany had hugged her on the rocks the first time.

—-

In all their haste and excitement about each other, they’d forgotten to agree on a rendez-vous for the following day, but that hardly mattered. It might have been for the best, Santana thought as she checked her shirt was setting neatly at the back; it gave her the pretext to walk to Brittany’s residence and introduce herself, hopefully making sure that at least one friend of Brittany’s would hate her a little less than they currently did. You never knew with people who had titles, but some of them would even be naive enough to take her outright arrival there as a sure sign that she could only have honourable intentions. Which she of course did, but the principle was still foolish.

She didn’t have many accessories to add to her clothing to make it more presentable, but she grabbed the hat she’d had to buy for her latest job as a cover. It was a nice hat, and went surprisingly well with her clothes. With any luck, it’d draw attention away from the fact that the dark stain on her sleeve was actual dried blood (hers, but that usually didn’t calm people down about it) and that the rest of her ensemble wouldn’t have stuck out among military personnel.

Given the modesty of the house, it didn’t seem impolite to walk right up to it and knock on the door.

She only had to wait for a few moments before an elderly woman, the very picture of a charming grandmother (she assumed; her first-hand experience was rather old and distorted by the fact that she’d been very young), opened the door.

“Excuse me,” Santana said with her friendliest smile. “I’m looking for Ms,” that was the worst possible moment to realise she’d never actually found out Brittany’s last name, but she kept the smile going on anyway, “Brittany? I understood she’s staying here?”

“Oh, you must be Ms Santana,” the woman said. “Brittany’s told me all about you. Please come in.”

Santana did as told, silently thanking her lucky stars that Brittany probably hadn’t mentioned her last name to the woman either, which wasn’t surprising since she’d only heard it a couple of times, and usually from the mouths of people neither of them probably cared to remember very well.

“I’m Alice,” the woman said, showing her into a sitting room and onto a sofa that had probably seen better days. “I’ll just go upstairs to tell Brittany you’re here, and then I’ll be right back.”

Santana thanked her and said something nice about the room that she made up (the atmosphere was pleasant, but it was also so because the place looked very lived-in, and she didn’t want to say that because for some people it wasn’t really a compliment and she’d yet to find out what kind of people Brittany’s hosts were concerning that particular matter), leaning a bit more into the sofa cushions as Alice left the room.

She wanted to think that the whole ordeal was going better than she’d been hoping for, but that was a sure-fire way to make everything go to hell within a moment of thinking so.

That kind of wariness was rewarded by the entrance of a rather fat cat into the room. It stopped dead on its tracks as it spotted Santana, tilting its head in a way that probably would have meant it was judging her if it was human. Santana assumed a similar look – she liked animals fine enough as long as they liked her back, but she wasn’t about to just sit and let the cat appraise her without returning the gesture – and the cat meowed, walking up to the sofa, jumping onto it and butting its head against Santana’s elbow.

Reaching out her other hand, Santana petted at it warily. When there was no attack of claws, she concluded that the assessment the cat had been conducting had clearly been positive and let herself relax a little.

“Santana!” came Brittany’s voice from the doorway, and soon after it Brittany, skipping towards the sofa.

Santana wanted to stand up to greet her, but she didn’t want to lose the cat’s friendship so quickly by pushing it away, and so she made do with smiling really widely.

“Hey.”

“Hi!” Brittany sat down on the sofa next to her and reached around her to pet at the cat. “I see you’ve met Lord Tubbington.”

“I-“ It made sense, now that she thought of it. Santana had met many lords, and while she was the first to admit that her sample was probably biased towards the horrible, she’d never met one who’d be kind enough to offer hospitality to a friend while being unable to live in a palace himself.

“We haven’t been formally introduced,” she said, “but we have met and got a little acquainted.”

“Lord Tubbington, Santana,” Brittany made the appropriate hand gestures, “Santana, Lord Tubbington. I’m very glad he isn’t as angry at you as I thought he might be. You can never guess what he’s up to.”

Had the cat looked a little friendlier at this solemn ceremony, Santana would have pretended to shake its paw. As it was, she wasn’t going to risk being scratched for the sake of a little play-acting.

“Very nice to meet you, sir,” she said instead and nodded at the cat, who looked vaguely like it appreciated the gesture, or so she decided to imagine.

She was just about to suggest to Brittany that they go out for a walk when Alice walked in balancing a tray of biscuits and some steaming drink Santana didn’t recognise, so they ended up sitting on the sofa for an hour talking pleasantries with Alice.

It was actually surprisingly nice, and in fact far more pleasant than whatever civilised grovelling she’d expected to be forced to perform for some uppity lord. Lord Tubbington, it turned out, was not even uppity enough to forgo hunting mice (in the nearby cheese shop, Alice hastened to add; Santana didn’t tell her that buildings with mice would be far from the worst places she’d spent time in, but she did smile politely) and in fact went off to do just that as soon as Brittany stopped feeding him biscuits. And as to Alice, she lived up to her image as a lovely little old cat lady. Santana didn’t particularly care about the comings and goings of people who lived along the street, but the stories didn’t even come off boring when told by Alice and it was indeed Brittany who, after they’d eaten all the biscuits and finished with the drink that turned out to be herbal tea, suggested that she and Santana leave to get some fresh air.

“Where do you want to go?” Santana asked as they were out the door, glancing at both directions. “You know the town better than I do.”

“Let’s go to the market,” Brittany said. “I’ve missed buying things with you.”

So had Santana, she realised as soon as they began. She didn’t live as ascetically when it came to food as she did to everything else since food by definition wasn’t something she needed to carry around for long periods of time after buying it, but she did have a habit of eating the same thing over and over again, save for when she was someplace where the cuisine was worth savouring. Brittany, unsurprisingly, was as eclectic with her eating habits as with so many things about her, and it didn’t take more than a few moments before they were sitting together at the root of a statue, sampling an assortment of jams (good; they might go back for larger amounts) and testing what apples and salted meat tasted like together (Brittany liked the contrast, but Santana only needed one bite to vow to eat hers separately in the future).

They passed from the food sellers to the artisans quickly enough, usually not going so close as to offer the seller an opportunity start their pitch but pointing things and whispering about them.

“That’s really pretty,” Santana said, pointing at a small wooden carving that had been adorned with rainbow colours. The pattern of leaves and branches with flowers and birds here and there was simple enough, but there was something about the execution that just made it incredibly pleasing to her eye.

“It is,” Brittany said.

“I know someone who’d probably kill to have that on his wall.” She thought back to Kurt and his carefully cultivated collection of knick-knacks whose presentation he changed according to seasons.

“Do you want to go closer to see it better?”

Santana shrugged her shoulders, but she was the first one who moved.

Luckily, the seller wasn’t one of the incredibly obnoxious ones, and simply kept an eye on them while they looked at the carvings. Santana tried to find faults with them, starting from the utter impracticability, and she did, but somehow that didn’t help her to look away.

“You know,” Brittany said after a few moments, “I don’t think your friend is the only one who’d kill to have that on their wall.”

Santana felt blood rush to her cheeks. “Maybe.”

“You could buy it.”

Brittany said it like it wasn’t incredibly obvious, which struck Santana as odd at first, but when she thought about it, she quickly realised it actually wasn’t, at least not in her head. They hadn’t yet talked of their future, but it was very unlikely they’d both move as much as they used to in the past, and Santana probably wouldn’t have to carry all of her earthly belongings on her back anymore.

She could have the useless, pretty rainbow-coloured thing if she liked.

“You know what,” she said, turning to Brittany and hoping her wide smile didn’t come off really weird. “I think I will.”

Brittany nodded. “You better get two, then.”

“You want one, too?”

“No, I can look at yours. But if you ever meet your friend again, I’d hate for him to try to kill you for it, because then you’d have to break both his arms and maybe his legs and healing bones hurts so that would be sad. For him, at least.”

Santana laughed. “He’s not exactly the kind of friend who’d first go for violence,” she said, “but you’re right, I think I’m going to buy one for him, too. You never know.”

She did it again, some moments later, when a scarf Brittany found just happened to match one of Mercedes’s dresses exactly, but that was the last of it.

Well, it was, if you didn’t count the soap that Tina absolutely would love that, according to the seller, would help get rid of the smell of manure.

—-

“It looks a little harsh, but it’s still really pretty,” Brittany said as they sat down and began spreading their picnic supplies. “I can see why you like it.”

Santana laughed to hide the truth in Brittany’s words, and glanced towards the sea. It was one of the places she’d found instead of Brittany, and for some reason actually being there with Brittany was making her more emotional than she felt comfortable being, even if there was only Brittany herself to see it.

“I did wonder a lot if you found your beautiful places the way I found this one,” she said. “I don’t mean searching everywhere for your loved one because you were an idiot, but just- walking around.”

Brittany smiled and offered her a sandwich. “A little like that. Walking’s nice.”

“I bet it’s nicer when you don’t have that aching feeling in your heart like you’re too late,” Santana said.

So much for turning the discussion into something less emotional, then.

Brittany reached out to lay her hand on top of Santana’s. “You weren’t,” she said. “You wouldn’t have been even if you’d only found me now.”

Santana breathed out slowly. “I just can’t stop thinking- If I’d taken more time to realise it, a couple more jobs maybe. Would you still have been here? And even if you’d have forgiven me after more time, who’s to say I would have found you? I didn’t know who you were with in this town, and if you’d chosen to move on to some other friend… You said you didn’t try to help me find you. What if I hadn’t?”

Brittany moved the cherry cake and inched to where it had been, making it easy for her to hug Santana.

“Then I would have found you,” she said, pressing a kiss to Santana’s shoulder. “It always happened before, it would have happened eventually.

Swallowing deeply and forcing her emotions under her control again, Santana made herself look at Brittany. “I’m sorry, it’s- It’s been a while since I’ve been able to be like this, feel stuff. It’ll get better, I swear, there’s just too much for the moment-“

“There’s nothing to make better.” Brittany ran her fingers down Santana’s arm. “Would you be mad at me if I cried on your arms a few times a week?”

“No, of course not-“

“It’s okay to feel stuff, Santana,” Brittany said, “and you don’t have to always be super calm about feeling it. You don’t have to be sorry for being sad sometimes. I mean I don’t want you to be sad, but I don’t want you to hide it when you are.”

“I’m not sad.” Her words were not the most credible, maybe, because she couldn’t quite see clearly and that was probably due to the tears in her eyes, but Brittany was usually creepily good at reading her so maybe she’d believe them anyway. “I’m actually feeling really happy. And a lot afraid that I’m going to ruin it, somehow.”

“You won’t,” Brittany said cheerfully. “I believe in you, Santana.”

She didn’t know if she was laughing or crying, but she was doing it while kissing Brittany, so that didn’t much matter.

—-

“I lied to you, one time,” she told Brittany one afternoon when they were lounging on Brittany’s bed.

Alice was in the adjacent room, so even though they’d slipped back into physical intimacy of that kind quickly enough, they’d partaken in nothing of the kind that day. They’d just simply cuddled as close to each other as they could and occasionally talked about things if something came to mind.

Brittany smiled at her. “Just once?”

“I think I didn’t say what I thought a lot of times, but I only lied once. At least I think so. It was so blatant that I remember it clearly.” Brittany didn’t ask her, but Santana couldn’t leave it unsaid for very much longer. “I’ve been to Sandor.”

“That’s quite a small lie,” Brittany said, running her fingers down along Santana’s arm until she reached Santana’s hand and intertwined their fingers. “I forgive you.”

“No, I mean, I’ve been there. I was born there.”

Brittany was looking down at their joint hands when Santana risked a glance in their direction, but her body was still relaxed and calm in Santana’s embrace.

“Where did your family have to go?” Brittany asked after a while, her voice more quiet than Santana ever remembered hearing it.

She’d understood without Santana having to say it, Santana realised. It wasn’t that surprising; she remembered how Brittany had spoken of her own parents.

Santana swallowed. “There was disease in my village; it came from some far-away travellers, we were told, but I’m not sure. For all I know, the liquor the mayor produced was contaminated and everyone drank it and became sick.”

“Did they all…?”

“Every single one. The village is still there, I think, but I didn’t stay there after everyone else was gone. I watched them to be buried, I-“ she swallowed, “I cried for the night, and then I left. I had just a little money, and to get more I took a job from mercenaries who wanted me to be a distraction. I think they thought I’d die, but I didn’t.”

“I’m glad you didn’t.”

“So am I.” She let out a bitter laugh. “Their work seemed interesting, and my uncle was a blacksmith so I knew something about swords and a little about fighting. Had to learn pretty quickly after that, but that’s my specialty.”

Brittany cuddled closer to her side. The warm weight was pleasant, and Santana tried to push herself even closer to it.

“You can learn as slowly as you want with me,” Brittany said. “I don’t mind.”

Santana laughed against Brittany’s skin. “Thanks, Brit-Brit. I’m still so sorry for how I messed up, but it’s nice to know I have someone around whom I can be less than perfect.”

“You could never be that,” Brittany said. “You’re always perfect. I asked Lord Tubbington, and he said he agrees, and he’s a nobleman so he should know.”

“From my experience being a noble is quite the proof about not knowing as much as one thinks they do,” Santana said, “but you can tell Lord Tubbington that I appreciate his good opinion anyway.”

“You could tell him yourself.” Brittany closed her eyes and rested her head against the pillows. “You’ll have a lot of chances to meet him every time you visit.”

“Yeah.” Santana moved forwards and pressed a kiss to Brittany’s nose. “Yeah, I will.”

—-

Santana counted exactly two weeks. Brittany didn’t strike her as the type to be very precise about these things, but she was most definitely the type to try to start very serious conversations at the moment when Santana expected them the least, and so she couldn’t wait for too long.

This was most definitely a conversation she wanted to initiate, if only because she wanted Brittany to see that it was important to her, too, and that Brittany wasn’t alone in thinking about their future together, however it had sometimes looked.

So, exactly two weeks after she’d found Brittany on the rocks staring at the sea, she took Brittany to the exactly same location, except this time with pie, listened attentively as Brittany told her about the whales who spat up water into the sky, waited for the opportune moment and then said, so casually she almost believed she hadn’t practiced it in her head a million times, “We should probably talk about the future.”

This time, she’d been prepared for any possible reaction save for the outright negative ones, but she was still a little surprised when Brittany took another slice of the pie and calmly, like it was nothing out of the ordinary, said, “Yes, we probably should.”

Santana didn’t allow herself to be thrown off for long, though, so she went on. “I still don’t know what I’m going to do. Most jobs that people offer to people like me are temporary, and I would still have to travel a lot without you.”

“I would be okay with that,” Brittany said, finding her hand and squeezing it soothingly. “We could pick a town close to everything and have a place there so you could come back easily every time you’re done.”

“But you wouldn’t really like that, would you?”

Brittany bit her lip. “I want to be with you as much as possible,” she said. “But I don’t want to force you to change jobs, so I’ll be happy with whatever is possible.”

Santana sighed. “Well, there’s always that permanent offer from the Tyrian army, but I’m guessing that’s out of the question.”

“What offer?” Brittany asked.

“They offered me a position commanding a regiment, permanently, and when I turned it down they told me there’s always some work for me if I find myself needing it.”

“Why don’t you take it, then?” Brittany smiled at her. “I could live in Tyria – I bet they need people to do some work there, too – and then you would always be coming home and wouldn’t have to spend time away trying to find more work. Plus if all of the soldiers are from there, too, you probably would get to come back often enough so that no one would revolt.”

The picture Brittany was painting was pleasant enough – considering that Santana already had friends in Tyria, it was indeed very pleasant – but there was still the reason Santana had mentally discarded the offer already.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Tyria,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound mean, “but it’s pretty landlocked. I don’t think you’d like it that far away from the sea.”

For some reason, Brittany perked up at the news like at nothing before.

“Is that the only reason you don’t want to take it?” she asked. “Would it be otherwise nice for you?”

“Well, I already made myself something of a reputation in the army,” Santana said. “And some friends in the capital. It’d be nice for me, but like I said, I don’t want to force you to-“

“But if I’m saying I want you to take the job,” Brittany interrupted her, “then you wouldn’t be forcing me at all.”

“But if you were only saying that to make me happy, then I’d just end up making you unhappy, and that’s pretty much the same thing.”

“What if it didn’t make me unhappy?”

Santana moved her hand so that it was around Brittany’s instead of the other way around, and squeezed.

“I know how much  you love the sea, you spent over a month just looking at it, I can’t ask you to give all that up just so that-“

“I spent over a month looking at what reminded me the most of you,” Brittany said. “If I got to look at you often, I wouldn’t need reminders.”

“But-“ Santana sighed. “It’s not just me, though? You loved it before I came along.”

“I loved it because it reminded me of my parents and because I thought my ship crew was like family. If I have you, I’m not going to have to look at it so often to feel happy.”

“You do have me,” Santana said. “I just- Are you sure I’m enough of a substitute for the vast oceans?”

Brittany thought for a moment. “You’d have to travel to the seaside with me sometimes,” she said. “But only sometimes. I promise I’m not just saying this because I think you’re going to leave if we don’t come up with something. I think it would really work well.”

Somehow, her words convinced Santana, probably because like so often before, Brittany hit the nail on the head on Santana’s feelings without ever having hinted at knowing before.

“Okay,” Santana said. “We’ll spend a little more time here so that you can stock up on your sea memories, and then we’ll travel to Tyria to take some gifts to my friends and to see about that offer, and if everything goes well, we’ll stay there and only come seaside for short holidays. Does that still sound like something you think you’d like?”

Brittany nodded solemnly. “I think I would like that a lot. Except that you forget the part where I get to be with you a lot and wake up to you wriggling under the blankets because it’s too hot but you don’t want to push me away and all of those little things that you do that make my heart beat faster without it making any sense.”

Santana couldn’t help her giggling; it just escaped, like it tended to do when Brittany was around.

“We could at least go by ship to Tampea, though,” she said. “Give you one last journey before swearing off the actual sea for a while.”

“I like that,” Brittany said. “Our first journey actually together.”

“Yeah,” Santana said, pulling Brittany tighter against herself. “May that journey never end.”


End file.
